For the Love of Coffee
by Rhianwen
Summary: [Chapter 10 up!] Every good evil organization needs a coffee guy, and the I-Jin were no exception. Being the I-Jin, they had the greatest coffee guy in history. This is his story. [Warning: Severe and incurable NancyYomiko bias. ]
1. Chapter 1

For the Love of Coffee – A Read or Die Story

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Disclaimer: I don't own Read or Die, or any of the characters depicted within this story, aside from Joe, the greatest coffee-guy in history, and my various random lab techies. This story is not in the interest of gaining a profit, which is good, because it has approximately zero merit. ^_^

Summary: Every good evil organization needs a coffee guy, and the I-Jin were no exception. Being the I-Jin, they had the greatest coffee guy in history. This is his story. (Note: Rhianwen has a severe and incurable Nancy/Yomiko bias. Her Joker/Wendy bias is also considerable. Exercise extreme caution. ^_^)

Author's Notes: I must note that characterization of Ikkyu may be somewhat (okay, incredibly, incredibly, didn't-even-try-to-write-him-properly) lacking in accuracy (and not just in the fact that he's around – it's another clone; what else? Created solely in the interest of a silly story, so I may be forgiven). This is indeed a silly story by name, nature, and everything else. Everyone will probably be out of character at some point or another. 

That being said, I don't mean any disrespect to these terrific characters. I just have fun with my silly stories. ^_^

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Chapter 1

Not long ago, in an alternate universe created mostly for the purposes of giving a certain fan fiction author somewhere to play with the characters that she had come to know and love after three all-too-brief episodes of an OVA series that she had never seen the corresponding manga for, a young man took a deep breath to calm his nerves and, letter of resignation in hand, knocked hesitantly on the door of his boss's office.

"Yes?" a rather sleepy voice called from within.

"Mr. Ikkyu, sir," the young man called shakily, unsure of exactly how one was supposed to address a clone of his boss (created and hidden in a shack in rural Manitoba just in case the impossible should happen and he should be killed), who himself had been recently killed in some nasty business involving a rocket, Beethoven, and a book, thus proving that the case wasn't nearly so impossible as Ikkyu had supposed it. "May I speak with you for a moment?"

"Ah! Joe!" the voice from within the office said warmly, seeming to wake up a bit. "Of course. I've always got a minute to spare for my favourite coffee guy."

Joe cleared his throat as he entered the messy, cluttered, and extremely offbeat office and took a seat (or a cushion, rather) opposite his boss.

"About that, sir," he began, sliding the letter across the tabletop. "I-I don't know how to say this, but…sir, I would like to resign from my position as Official I-Jin Coffee Guy."

Ikkyu turned pale. Having his original killed, his fortress destroyed, and worst of all, his straw hat taken away was one thing – or three things, rather. But to lose Joe on top of it all!

"Joe," he said resolutely, "I would like to ask you to please reconsider."

"I've thought a lot about this, Mr. Ikkyu, and I really don't think this is the right place for me."

"Why is that? Please know that I am willing to do whatever it takes to change your mind. Are your wages a problem?"

"I didn't know I got paid," Joe commented reflectively.

"Well…we'll start paying you!"

"The money isn't the problem, though!"

"Is it the other minions?"

"No, it's not them," Joe sighed ungrammatically. "They're all nice enough, if you don't mind a slightly evil bent. Except for Freud. He's just creepy. If I may speak freely, sir, I don't know why you needed one of him around."

"Well, if I read my predecessor's memories right, it had something to do with my glee at seeing women chase him about the room with blunt objects when he referred to them as castrated males and talked about penis envy," he said absently. "But, Joe, if Freud's been bothering you, I'll get rid of him! Kill him! Simple as that. I've done it before, you know."

Joe laughed nervously, opting against explaining to Ikkyu that his manner of dealing with minions that annoyed him was most of the problem. Then he sobered.

"I'm sorry, sir, but there's nothing you can do to change my mind. I've thought long and hard about taking this step, and I feel that it's time for me to move on. Here's my letter of resignation. My last day will be two weeks from Friday."

"No, Joe, if this is really the step that you feel you need to take, I'll release you from your duties as I-Jin Coffee Guy as of today," Ikkyu sighed. "Clean out your desk, turn in your time card, and good luck to you in your future endeavours."

"Thank-you," Joe said, feeling an absurd lump in his throat. After all, there had been good times as well as bad. No! If he started to think about that, he would waver. And he could not waver. Bravely, he continued. "And may I say, sir, it's been a pleasure working for you. Good day."

With that, gathering together all his courage to do so, Joe stood and walked from the room in as dignified and stately a manner as he could.

Certainly, his dignity would have been far less had he been aware that, just behind the closed door, as he made his way down the hallway with legs that felt as though they'd been turned to jelly by sheer fear, Ikkyu was regarding the closed door thoughtfully.

"Yes, Joe, it's been a pleasure having you here," he murmured to himself. "A pleasure that will remain all mine. You will never serve coffee to anyone else, Joe. Never. If I have to kill you to make it happen, it will happen."

Of course, being a busy jingly-staff-wielding guy, Ikkyu certainly did not intend to do the killing himself. Rising from his cushion, he made his way at the slow, relaxed pace befitting a villain constantly sounding on the verge of falling asleep, from his office, down the hallway, and through a door, the third from the end of the hall, on the left side. 

"Listen, boys," he began, addressing he several scientists milling about the lab, busily doing scientist-things. Addressing them as 'boys' was most unfair, as many, indeed over half, were not 'boys' at all, but either old men, or women of varying ages. "I have a few new orders for you all. We have recently lost our coffee guy." 

He paused for a moment to let the news sink in. The reactions of his scientist team did not disappoint him. They all gave a shocked, horrified gasp and began asking each other frantically who would get them their coffee now. Finally, as it seemed that a few were on the verge of hysterical tears, he continued.

"You don't have to worry, though," he reminded them comfortingly. "Remember who we are. We can just make a new one. You, there," he said, nodding towards a young redheaded man with an eternally shy, scared look and an abundance of freckles. "We need a genetic sample to make a replacement. Please bring me a cup of Joe."

"Why do I get the feeling that these horrible puns won't end here?" a dark-haired man muttered to a man of remarkably similar appearance. 

"Because we're being written by Rhianwen," the other dark-haired man replied. 

"Ah," the first guy nodded, understanding entirely.

"Wonderful!" Ikkyu was meanwhile saying as the redhead reappeared, clutching the necessary 'cup of Joe'. "We'll get right on the creation of a new clone of the greatest coffee guy in history!"

"When you say 'we', you mean 'you', don't you?" a young lady with a light brown ponytail asked.

Ikkyu pondered this for a moment.

"Yes."

"If I may speak freely, sir," the young woman continued, "it seems a little strange that you would have a team of scientists around, if you never let us do anything."

"I let you do things!" he protested. "Why, just now, I let that boy run an errand!"

"Yes, sir, and I appreciate it," the redheaded boy assured him. "It's just that…well, we all spent a great deal of time in university, and we learned to do a lot more than run errands."

"Very well," Ikkyu said hesitantly. "I didn't realize you all felt this way. But since you do, how about I let you create the hit team that will go after Joe and punish him for his treachery?" 

Twenty-four scientists gazed at him with clasped hands and shiny eyes, much to his consternation and slight worry.

"You'd really do that, sir?" one old man asked, sounding giddy as a schoolgirl at the possibility of actually doing something.

"W-well, sure," he shrugged. "After all, I'm making our new Joe. I'll be busy."

"Thank-you, Mr. Ikkyu!" twenty-four scientists chorused together.

"Of course," he said, eyes darting nervously about. "I leave this entirely in your hands."

"O-kay!"

"Right. Well, I'll be going now," he informed everyone before darting from the room, pondering as he went the pros and cons of eliminating his entire team of scientists for being too damned weird.

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As Joe stepped outside the newly reconstructed I-Jin fortress, he took a deep breath.

"Ah! Freedom!" he said happily. "Never again will I be Joe the Coffee Guy! A whole new world of opportunities is opening up before me! Now, the first thing I've got to do is look for a new job…preferably one that actually pays."

On his way to the staff parking lot, he ticked off possibilities in his mind.

"Hmm…where can I apply? Starbucks? No! That's coffee again! Second Cup? Dammit! That's coffee, too! Ooh! I know! Tim Horton's! I've always wanted to work with donuts! Y-yes…donuts. Not coffee. Donuts. It doesn't matter if Tim Horton's coffee is loved the world around. I seek to work there only in the interest of working with donuts."

And so, this assurance in mind, Joe set off for his home, a plan to write out a resume and get to the Tim Horton's before it closed all set in his mind.

A pity nothing ever goes as planned, isn't it?  
  


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"Mr. Ikkyu!" the little freckled redheaded boy cried as he burst into a smaller section of the lab, closed off from the rest.

As the sound of a shattering test tube filled the air, it occurred to this boy that knocking before barging in on one's extremely malicious and heartless boss while said boss was in the middle of a meticulous process might have been a little stupid.

Wiping the glass and Joe off of his hands, Ikkyu regarded the boy calmly. 

"What is it, Li'l Timmy?"

"F-first of all, sir, my name is Peter," Peter said, confused as to where his boss had gotten Tim from, never to speak of Li'l Timmy. 

"All right, Peter, continue."

"We're finished with the hit team!" he announced proudly. "Phil and Bob sent me to tell you."

The evil villainous mastermind blinked.

"Already?"

"We told you we were good for more than errands," Peter grinned.

"Oh, right. Well, wonderful! I'll come take a look. I could use a break from this, anyway," he finished ruefully. "Sadly, it seems as though Joe really was one-of-a-kind."

"If anyone can make a new Joe, Mr. Ikkyu, you can!"

"Thank-you, Peter," he laughed fondly, ruffling the boy's hair. "That's a good little butt-kisser."

As Peter skipped happily down the hall, Ikkyu watched him carefully. _I'll have him killed for interrupting me as soon as we're done with Joe._

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"So, that's basically it," he finished five minutes later, addressing his newly cloned hit team of twenty men.

The twenty men exchanged dubious looks.

"I don't think we can do this," one of them finally said.

Ikkyu frowned.

"Why not?"

"Because we find a plan of such violence unnecessary."

"Nevertheless, the plan will be carried out."

"Not by us, then," another one of the men called out.

With a Herculean effort, Ikkyu kept his expression neutral, wishing once again that his predecessor had cloned his hat along with himself. It would have been much easy to pull off a good poker face with a big straw hat covering most of said face. 

"Very well, then. You may all leave."

"Thank-you, sir," they all chorused together, walking in single-file out the door.

After the last one had left, he turned to glare at his team of scientists.

"Okay, whose bright idea was it to make an assassin team out of twenty clones of Ghandi?" 


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

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The afternoon was mild and warm, the sun shining lazily down past the tall buildings of the city of Tokyo on the throngs of people hurrying up and down the sidewalks. Plenty of time for relaxing once they weren't blocking the sidewalks by doing it. Even on a Sunday afternoon, there was no reason to dawdle. 

Unless, of course, one was carrying upwards of seventy pounds of books in various bags and dragging another forty pounds behind oneself in a wheely-suitcase. 

Yes, it seemed that Yomiko Readman had yet to learn the meaning of the word "restraint". 

As she absent-mindedly weaved her way through the afternoon crowds, nearly every member of said crowds stopped to either smile indulgently or gawp unashamedly, if only for a moment. After all, she made an odd picture: a lone young woman, clad in a slightly rumpled black skirt, white blouse, brown vest, and thick glasses, her long black hair in slight disarray as though she had bolted out of the house right after waking up without bothering to hunt up a comb (which she hadn't…not at all…and certainly not in the interest of going on a book-binge instead…heh-heh-heh…), dragging with her, of course, the aforementioned one hundred and ten pounds of books. Whether due to the oddness of the girl's appearance or to her aura of unassuming friendliness, the people on the street made more of a point of clearing a way for her than they might have for anyone else walking down the street with their nose buried firmly in a book.

Thus, she reached the sidewalk leading up to her apartment without incident before Fate decided to give her a little poke to show her what happened when a person didn't watch where they were going. 

From the opposite direction, a young man came barrelling down the street, throwing anxious glances over his shoulder every now and again. Here was another odd picture, this tall, lanky, sandy-haired young man, his pants covered in dirt, his tie flapping wildly over his shoulder, and certainly a picture that anyone else in the world would have heeded and moved to avoid. 

However, Yomiko was not anyone else in the world, and was particularly unlikely to notice things that anyone else in the world would have noticed, when she had a book. 

And so, a massive collision took place on a fairly typical sidewalk between two fairly atypical people. 

The young man went flying back. 

The young woman went flying back.

Books filled the air.

The young man lay, dazed, on the sidewalk.

The young woman sat up dizzily and exclaimed in horror as one of the books was run over by a car, and darted out into the road, regardless of traffic, to retrieve it and utter to it soothing reassurances that she would take it home and make it better again.

The young man pulled himself into a sitting position and wondered if the young woman were some sort of nut, and desperately hoping she had been like this before and he hadn't caused any lasting damage by running into her.

The young woman peered suspiciously over her shoulder at the young man as he stood up and wondered if he had been the one responsible for her book being injured.

"Gee, sorry about that," the young man said sheepishly, stooping to retrieve the book nearest his foot. 

Yomiko glanced up from her task of hurriedly picking up several dozen books before they could be trampled beneath the feet of passers by who apparently didn't care as much for keeping the valuable tomes of wisdom in good condition as she did.

"Uh, that's okay," she assured him quickly.

"I was kind of in a hurry, to tell you the truth."

"Uh, that's nice," she said politely, putting the books carefully back into their bags.

"In fact, I'm in a bit of trouble."

"Uh, that's too bad," she said with another quick glance up at him.

"But, you know, I feel bad, so why don't you let me help you carry those home?"

"Oh, that's okay. I'm right here."

"Hey, even better! Actually," he whispered sheepishly, "I've really got to go to the bathroom."

Considering the matter for a moment, Yomiko decided that whatever would let her get her poor, abused purchases home most quickly was the way to go.

"If you'd like to come in for a minute and use mine, I don't mind," she said, wondering curiously where this odd sinking feeling was coming from.

"I'm Joe, by the way," he said absently, glancing over his shoulder nervously.

"Nice to meet you, Joe, even if you did make a car run over one of my books" she smiled. "I'm Yomiko Readman."

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"Woooooooooooooooooooow, that's a lot of books!" Joe exclaimed rather tactlessly a few minutes later. 

"Mr. Joe, didn't you have to use the washroom?" Yomiko prompted impatiently, hunting for a free space on her bookshelf.

"Oh, right," Joe laughed sheepishly, disappearing into the washroom.

"What a weird man," she said, shaking her head sadly. Then she glanced down at the book currently in her hand, and two seconds later, was lost to the world.

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When Joe emerged from the washroom a few minutes later, it was just in time to hear a frantic tapping at the door. With a frightened yelp, he dived behind one of the many piles of books scattered at random throughout the room.

"Please don't let them find me," he begged.

Yomiko, still immersed in her book, glanced up for the briefest second.

"Hmm."

Joe waited, breaking out in a cold sweat as the tapping continued. When, after two minutes, the girl by the bookshelf had made no move to get the door, he decided to intervene.

"Uh, there's someone at the door," he called.

Looking up, Yomiko listened carefully.

"Oh! So there is!"

"Please don't tell them I'm here!" he pleaded again.

After looking through the peephole, Yomiko turned around and looked strangely at him.

"If you say so, but it's just a vacuum cleaner salesman," she told him.

"Oh, God, the horror," he whimpered, burrowing deeper into the pile.

With a shake of her head, she opened the door.

Ten minutes and one disastrous demonstration later, a badly frightened vacuum cleaner salesman bolted from the apartment, cursing the tendency of his clientele to leave piles of books lying around where they could easily be sucked up, as a razor-sharp cue card whizzed past his ear, slicing cleanly through a lock of hair.

"And don't come back unless you've got books!" the incensed young woman called after him.

Joe watched in amazement as Yomiko shut the door with a slam that would have been normal for anyone else, but was extraordinarily vicious for her.

"You…you almost killed that guy with a piece of paper!"

"You try having seven of your favourite books ruined by a demonstration of a vacuum you don't want, and see how you react," she said defensively. "I kind of lost my temper."

"That's not really what I meant," Joe told her, straightening up and carefully returning the books he had knocked over to their piles. After all, death by paper-cut would _not_ be a good way to go, and she seemed a little too protective of her books. "I mean, I think you might be able to help me! You see, my tragic story began three days ago when I decided to look for a new job. After a good deal of searching, a kindly old lady at a mini-mart hired me! But the newfound peace and security of my existence was torn away from me when several shady-looking characters showed up while I was heading home from today's shift. You see, I'm being pursued by a bunch of guys sent by my former boss, who wants me dead."

"Um…why does he want you dead?"

"Because I resigned from my position as the group's official coffee guy."

"I guess your boss must really love his coffee…"

"Naw, I just make a darned good cup of joe!" he told her proudly.

Yomiko pondered this for a moment.

"But…aren't _you_ Joe?"

Joe sighed.

"Uh, never mind. Anyway, can you help me?"

She considered this.

"Well, I've got to be honest, Joe. I kind of have a personal policy about these things."

"What's that?" he asked breathlessly.

"I don't like to commit unless there are books involved. Preferably books that are being read by me."

Joe thought quickly. 

"Hmm…well, I do have a copy of Moby Dick."

"Moby Dick, you say? Herman Melville…"

"Yup, sure is," Joe agreed with artificial brightness, wondering not for the first time what sort of lunatic he had stumbled upon. "It's a little beat up, thought."

This got her attention. She looked up sharply.

"First edition?"

"Y-yes," he said quickly, eyes shifting nervously from side to side. "First edition."

"Mr. Joe, people tell me that I'm too trusting, but even I'm not going to believe a story like that! A first edition copy of Moby Dick? What kind of fool do you take me for?"

Joe had just begun to reply indignantly, all the more indignantly because he had indeed been lying through his teeth, when a shrill ring filled the apartment. The young man glanced frantically about until he found the source of the sound.

"Uh, Miss Readman, that pile of books is ringing," he said.

"Oh, that's just the phone," she told him with a smile, digging for a moment.   
"I still think you'd do well to clean up a bit," he said mildly.

She glared at him as fiercely as she possibly could have glared at anyone.

"And you should stop tricking girls into letting you into their apartments."

"Ouch," he intoned sadly as she extricated a telephone receiver from beneath several paperback novels. 

"Hello?" she was meanwhile greeting the person at the other end of the line. She frowned. "What?" A pause. "Oh…that's interesting. A coffee guy? What did you say his name was again?" Another pause. Yomiko shot Joe a suspicious look. "Joe?" Another pause. "I understand. Thank-you. Bye!" 

Joe laughed nervously as she hung up the phone, not knowing quite what to expect. Whatever he had expected, though, it certainly wasn't to hear her exclaim, partially annoyed and just a little bit panicked,

"Why didn't you tell me the people trying to kill you were I-Jin?!"

Joe blinked. 

"You've heard of them?"

"Yeah! We thought we'd killed them."

"Who is 'we', exactly?"

"Section A, Library Special Forces!"

"A…library," Joe repeated slowly. "From the state of your apartment, this shouldn't surprise me. So, they know about ol' Joe, eh?"

She nodded absently, hunting up her suitcase and taking the books out. 

"I'm supposed to be looking for you."

"Hey, I guess I just made your job a bit easier, huh?" Joe chuckled.

"Please don't say that," she requested, her expression pained. "It always makes the job about five times harder when you say it's going to be easy."

"Okay, okay, sorry. So, what are you supposed to do when you find me?"

Here her expression grew more pained still. 

"I'm supposed to bring you to see Mr. Gentleman. He wants to know a few things."

"Mr. Gentleman?! What kind of a name is that?!"  
"Don't let him hear you asking things like that," Yomiko advised him severely, stuffing little sheets of paper into her suitcase.

"What are you doing?" Joe asked wearily.

"I'm making sure I'm well armed," she told him seriously. 

He sighed.

"Right."

"Now, let's get going. We're supposed to meet the helicopter that Mr. Joker is sending for us in about two hours."

Joe stared.

"How far away is this place?"

"Not far," Yomiko replied cheerfully. "But I need to stop somewhere on the way."

"Is it a bookstore, by any chance?"

Now it was her turn to stare.

"Are you psychic, Mr. Joe?"

"Yup," he replied, eyeing the piles and piles and piles of books. "I'm psychic."

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"Isn't the helicopter here yet?" Joe whined, casting an alarmed glance over his shoulder as a flurry of movement, which turned out to be a small child chasing a puppy, caught his eye.

"In a little while," Yomiko replied absently, flipping a page. Then she looked up from her book. "You're the one who was in such a hurry before that you couldn't even let me take the time to find a decent book."

"You just bought a hundred and ten pounds of them!" Joe exclaimed. "Why do you need more?"

"I was only on my second trip," she informed him coolly. "I was going to go out again one more time. I just had to cut it short because of what Mr. Joker said."

"You're nuts," Joe began to say, but then gave a shriek of terror and leapt behind her as a faint rustling drifted from a nearby bush. "What's that?!"  
"It's a bunny, Mr. Joe," Yomiko tried to say, having just as little success prying his arms away from where they were clinging around her neck. "Can't…breathe…"

"Oh, sorry," he said sheepishly, releasing her. "Just got a little spooked."

"You mean like the twenty-seven other times since we got to this conveniently-placed wide open field with a helicopter pad in the middle of it?" she asked as close to sarcastically as she had come since high school. "I guess that's why you kept taking my book away and throwing it at people."

"What can I say?" Joe shrugged. "I'm jittery today."

"Well, stop being jittery. I won't let anything happen to you."

"That's so sweet!" Joe exclaimed, hands clasped and eyes shiny. 

"After all, Mr. Joker said he'd give me a really special book if I got you to Mr. Gentleman safely!"

Joe's face fell, and he likely would have said more about the ghastly state of the grand tradition of chivalry (despite the obvious problems with his application of the concept), had he not chosen that moment to look up as a massively loud noise filled the air.

"Dear God!" he yelped, ducking behind Yomiko once again. "Now the I-Jin have sent a helicopter after me!"

"He's hopeless," Yomiko sighed, putting her book away temporarily, prying Joe off of her once again, and looking up at the helicopter with Library Special Forces painted across the side.

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	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

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"Alright, everyone, if you could turn your attention this way for a moment, I have something to discuss with you," Ikkyu called to his recently created _new_ team of scientists as he entered the lab. His first team of scientists, along with the utterly useless assassin team of Ghandis, having mysteriously stopped breathing and developing knives, pointy staves, swords, and the like through the head, chest, or neck, he had been obliged to create a new scientist team that very night. Although cloning ten new scientists from the remains of his ten favourite old ones – after all, Ikkyu was trying to be economical – had taken a good deal of time and had set him hopelessly behind schedule, it was infinitely easier than trying to create an assassin team of thirty to forty men. So, he had set the task to his ten new scientists while he had gone to take a nap. However… "I've just found out some most disturbing news. Joe has evaded our assassin team, and we currently don't know where he is."

"Well…" the clone of the shy little redheaded kid, whom some of us may remember as Peter, began slowly, "can't we just make a new one?"

Ikkyu looked up at him sharply, and then smiled a rather scary, although utterly calm, smile. The scientist team exchanged wary glances. Then Ikkyu gave a small, barely perceptible nod, and as if on cue, Peter flew across the room, into a wall, and stayed there, pinned firmly in place by shards of broken test tubes, beakers, glass tubing, and flasks, blood seeping out from the various glass-wounds.

Nine scientists stared incredulously in the direction from which the barrage of broken glass seemed to have come. Another Peter smirked back at them as he juggled three Erlenmeyer flasks. Then he crossed the room slowly until he was directly in front of the quickly glazing eyes of his predecessor.

"I think you've missed the point, lad," he chuckled.

"I quite agree," Ikkyu said mildly. "Now, did anyone else have any questions?"

Nine scientists shook their heads vigorously. 

"Wonderful. Then let's get started with a new assassin team, shall we?"

"Why?" a tall oldish man, his hair beginning to turn from brown to a fine iron grey, asked in astonishment, already forgetting the fate of Peter, ironically, as the young man's corpse was still cooling on the wall.

"Apparently, when you put twenty clones of St. Benedict of Nursia together on an assassin team, not a lot gets done."

"Uh-oh…" nine scientists chorused together, laughing weakly.

"They all 'rediscovered God', and left my employment to 'dedicate their lives to His service." 

"W-we're sorry, sir," the woman with the brown ponytail stammered out lamely. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. I heard that all Christians are violent psychos." 

"Yeah; that's what I heard, too," a totally unremarkable brown-haired man agreed.

"It seems as though more research would have benefited in this case," Ikkyu sighed. "Although, the ones that ran off to found monasteries don't worry me nearly as much as the one who stripped naked and threw himself into a rose bush next to the church as penance because a girl walked by and he had impure thoughts about her. He said he couldn't find a thorn patch, so a rosebush would have to suffice."

"Eugh…"

"Yes, Peter, 'eugh' about covers it," Ikkyu said dryly. "Now, shall we try again? And this time, NO PACIFISTS!" 

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"Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow! And I thought your apartment had a lot of books!" Joe exclaimed as he and Yomiko followed Joker through the massive room of happy book-ness. 

"I'm working on building up my collection," Yomiko confided, eyes wide and sparkly as she gazed around the room. "I think it's good to have something to aspire to."

"Yeah, I know what you mean," Joe said with a smile of complete understanding. "I had a goal to fill my home with more coffee beans than anywhere else on earth. But that's all in the past," he hurriedly continued. "My life has nothing further to do with coffee. No serving coffee, no drinking coffee, no…hey, I think I smell coffee!"

"Er…this is the man that the I-Jin are after?" Joker muttered to Yomiko as Joe scampered over to the young man passing with a steaming mug and pleaded with him to let him freshen his cup.

Yomiko made a gesture of helpless confusion.

"Maybe they're really, really bored?"

"I can't do it!" Joe was meanwhile sobbing, huddled in a little ball at the bewildered young man's feet. "I can't give up the coffee business! It's in my blood! Literally! They put coffee in my blood to make me the best coffee guy in existence! Their team of scientists was having an off-day…"

With a long-suffering sigh, Joker swept a hand back over his hair.

"To be honest, Agent Paper, I was beginning to wonder if they're not a little masochistic."

"Yeah," she agreed sadly.

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"Good day to you, Joker," the elderly man greeted from the large, ornate chair where he sat, absently stroking his pet turtle. "And to you, Yomiko."

"Hello, Mr. Gentleman," Joker returned, bowing politely, while next to him, Yomiko smiled cheerfully. 

"Hello!"

With a fond chuckle, Mr. Gentleman turned slightly to survey the lanky, dishevelled young man lurking in the doorway.

"Well, come in, then," he called.

Visibly quaking, either with apprehension of with caffeine withdrawal, Joe obeyed, shooting the old man a wobbly smile. 

"H-hello, sir," he managed to get out around many vocal cracks.

"And so this is Joe, Official I-Jin Coffee Guy."

"_Former _Official I-Jin Coffee Guy," Joe corrected. Nervousness or no, there were some things that a person simply had to correct people on. "I quit."

"Yes, we know," Mr. Gentleman said. "You've sent them into quite an uproar, from what I understand."

"That's funny; my boss – well, my ex-boss – said he understood."

"Well, you can't always go by what these villains say. Their true thoughts and feelings are in their actions." 

Joe had begun to nod sadly, but halted as something caught his eye.

"Hey, is that coffee you're drinking?" he asked, peering into the mug in Mr. Gentleman's hand.

"Er…yes, yes it is," the old man replied hesitantly, exchanging apprehensive and confused looks with Joker. 

"It looks a little muddy. It's got little clouds of coffee grounds in it!"

"Well, that's how it's always been."

"I could tell you how to avoid that, if you'd like."

"Listen, young man, I've drunk my coffee this way for longer than you've been alive. Now, be a good little boy and-"

"You know how to avoid muddy coffee?" Joker broke in, staring admiringly at Joe. 

"Indeedy-doo!" 

"Joe, when we're done here, would you show me how?"

"Sure! I could also show you fifteen different ways to lighten your coffee without milk!"

"Wonderful!"

"What…just happened?" Mr. Gentleman asked bewilderedly.

Yomiko just shook her head, equally baffled.

"I don't know…why did you want us to bring Joe to you, Mr. Gentleman?"

The elderly man's eye that wasn't trapped behind some sort of mechanical device narrowed as Joe snatched up his coffee cup and began explaining to Joker exactly what was wrong with it. 

"Honestly, Yomiko, I've forgotten."

-------------------------------------------------------

Three hours and a change of scenery later, Yomiko still hadn't found her answer.

"Mr. Joker?" she called timidly.

No reply from Joker, who was listening in rapt attention as Joe explained the proper way to get just the right consistency of foam from a cappuccino machine. They had relocated to Joker's office once Mr. Gentleman got well and truly fed up with the endless discussion of coffee, and told them that they would discuss what was to be done about the I-Jin just as soon as Joe and Joker could focus.

"Mr. Joe?" she tried.

No reply from Joe, who was apparently rather enjoying the sound of his own voice.

"Oh, well," she shrugged, pulling a book from the inside pocket of her coat. "No one can say I didn't try."

"Joe, I honestly never knew there was so much in the fine art of coffee! And to think, all this time, I've been drinking tea! You have truly shown me the light."

"A light that all too few people get to see. Remember, Mr. Joker, life's too short to drink bad coffee." 

"Mr. Joker?" a voice called from the door.

Both men looked up immediately. Yomiko did not.

"Oh! Yes, Wendy, come in," Joker invited warmly. 

"I've brought those files you asked for," she said, stepping carefully through the various and sundry piles of papers, books, and the occasional small animal littered about the room. _Oh, dear, I forgot to take those home with me,_ she reflected, blushing brightly, as she noticed a pair of small pink silk undies lying amid the mess near Joker's desk.

"Thank-you very much." 

"You're welcome. And shall I bring in your 4:18 p.m. cup of tea?"

"No, Wendy, that's quite all right. I've had several cups of coffee in the last hour," the blond man grinned, his foot tapping energetically against the floor.

"Coffee?" Wendy repeated, confused and a little hurt. "I didn't know you drank coffee."

"Well, I do enjoy a nice cup of joe every now and again."

Yomiko looked up from her book.

"A cup of Joe? That's awful! You don't know where he's been!"

Joker sighed, rubbing his forehead wearily.

"Someone should really explain that quaint colloquialism to her before this becomes a running gag."

"Too late," Wendy said sorrowfully. "You only have to use a joke three times before it qualifies as a running gag."

"It's getting lower every year," Joker reflected, shaking his head sadly at the state of the world. "At any rate, Wendy, would you like a cup of coffee? Our new friend Joe here is something of an expert."

"N-no, thank-you," Wendy replied hastily. "If there's nothing else, sir…"

"No, that was all. In fact, why don't you take a break? It's a beautiful afternoon. Why not go for a walk?"

"If you say so, sir," Wendy agreed, turning to leave, lip quivering slightly, but head held high. After all, she would not lose her dignity before this beverage-serving-usurper! At that moment, her foot caught on the edge of the large area rug spread out over the floor, and she pitched forward.

"Ow," she whimpered plaintively, rubbing her nose.

At the thud, Yomiko looked up from her book, startled, and smiled as her gaze lit on the girl sprawled out on the floor amid a profusion of file folders and papers.

"Oh, hi, Wendy. When did you get here?"

"A few minutes ago," the blonde sighed.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes, of course," Wendy assured her, utterly unconvincingly.

"Are you sure? You look a little sad."

"Well…I can't exactly talk about it here."

"Okay, then, let's go talk in the coffee room."

As Wendy bristled visibly, Yomiko shrank back nervously.

"Um…on second thought, let's go talk in the park."

--------------------------------------------

"I just don't get it," Wendy sighed, dropping to the park bench. "Every day, for as long as I've been his secretary, I've brought him tea everyday at 4:18 p.m., on the button. Every day! Honestly, this has never happened before! What did I do wrong?"

"I don't think you did anything wrong. Joker probably just wanted a cup of coffee."

"But…but…I could have made coffee!"

"Well, Joe _is_ the best coffee guy in existence, you know," the dark-haired girl said thoughtfully. "He was genetically engineered that way, or something."

"I don't care who he is! It doesn't make it hurt any less when my tea and I are swept aside the moment something new and interesting comes along!"

"I'm afraid I don't see the problem, Wendy," Yomiko admitted slowly. "It's just coffee, after all. Mr. Joker will probably get tired of it again in no time!" 

"That isn't the point!" Wendy exclaimed, just short of a wail. "I can't just wait around for that to happen! I have needs, too!"

"Um…well…I still don't get it," Yomiko said, shaking her head helplessly.

"What?!"

"You'll have to put it into language she'll understand," a voice from a few feet away said, laughing. "Ask her how she'd feel if someone came along who bought so many books, that all the bookstores started calling them their new best customer."

Both girls looked up abruptly, all set to be annoyed that someone was listening in on their private conversation. Their annoyance melted quickly into astonishment. 

"Er…hello," Wendy greeted nervously, moving to the very end of the bench. "Let you out of the hospital, have they? That's…that's good. And reconsidered on that whole 'standing trial' thing? Wonderful news. I'm glad for you, I'm sure." 

Nancy smothered a smile, looking from the nervously rambling Wendy to Yomiko, who seemed to have gotten a gear stuck somewhere between astonishment and incredulous joy. 

"You okay?" she asked, sitting on the bench next to her erstwhile partner. 

"Didn't…didn't I just come to see you in the hospital a few weeks ago?" 

"That was my…my 'little sister'." 

Still teetering on the very edge of the bench, Wendy blinked in confusion.

"It was? But…ow," she finished plaintively, rubbing her head.

"Then it's you!" Yomiko was meanwhile exclaiming. "The first you!"

"Well, close enough," Nancy agreed, trying rather futilely to keep her balance while being tackle-hugged. 

"How did you get back? Out of the rocket, I mean," Yomiko asked, releasing her.

"Yes," Wendy agreed. "Doesn't that sort of thing tend to be rather bad for one's health?"

Nancy looked nervously from side to side.

"Uh…um…well, uh…hey, look over there!" 

While Wendy and Yomiko were peering curiously in the direction she had indicated, she darted from the park, into the nearest vehicle, and the next moment, the sound of a car roaring into motion and down the street filled the air.

Yomiko frowned. 

"Did Nancy just run away and steal a cab?"

"It looks like she did," Wendy replied, squinting in the direction that she had run. A very angry cab driver was pacing furiously up and down the sidewalk. 

"Oh," Yomiko nodded. "Okay."

Wendy sighed.

"Why do I get the horrible feeling that this won't be the silliest thing to happen today?"


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

* * *

"Hi, Nancy," Yomiko greeted cheerfully and surprisingly casually when she and Wendy returned to the library twenty-five minutes later, to find her waiting for them on the massive stone steps.

After all, a long walk really had been required to get Wendy over her fury at men everywhere. It had been rather worrisome when she had started plotting against Joe. To be sure, her plots had all been small annoyances, such as tying his shoe laces together, loosening the top of his pepper shaker, replacing his salt with sugar and his sugar with salt, and toilet-papering his house – Wendy had never been good at devious schemes – but even this was something totally out of the ordinary for the sweet, friendly, kindly-hearted secretary, and Yomiko had thought it best to steer her away from the library for a while. Give her time to compose herself.

However, at long last, they had found their way back, as, apparently, had Nancy.

"Did you return that vehicle to that poor cabby?" Wendy asked sternly.

"Yeah, I gave it back," she replied.

"Yeah; what was stealing the cab all about, anyway?" Yomiko asked with a frown.

"You know, I have no idea," Nancy admitted, equally confused. "I think it's something in the water here."

"It makes you steal cars?"

"No, it just makes the water taste bad."

Wendy looked from one to the other, and then blinked several times. Then…

"Owwwww…Wendy is confused."

"It's okay, Wendy," Yomiko assured her comfortingly. "It's been a confusing day for all of us."

"Why? What's going on?" Nancy asked.

"Well, apparently we didn't do a very good job of getting rid of all of the I-Jin."

"Oh, Ikkyu brought out one of his clones?"

Wendy and Yomiko blinked in simultaneous confusion.

"I don't know why I'm surprised," Wendy sighed.

"So, how many Ikkyus are there, anyway?" Yomiko asked.

"I don't really know," Nancy admitted thoughtfully. "I know of about five or six, but a few of them are just for parts."

"Yick."

"Well, accidents happen when you're a nefarious villain."

"I guess…"

"So, they're back, hmm? Any idea what they're doing?"

"No, not really."

"They're probably just trying to get back on their feet right now. I wonder which one took over. I'll bet it's the one he stashed in Northern Ontario."

"Why did he leave him in Northern Ontario?" Yomiko asked, bewildered.

"Cold tolerance. That, and he wanted to instil a healthy hatred of all people everywhere."

"A _healthy_ hatred, you say?" Wendy murmured.

"Northern Ontario would be one of the best places to do it," Nancy continued. "There are only fourteen people who live there."

"I've heard about that," Wendy said. "All named Frank, right?"

"Even the girl," Yomiko added. "Isn't she really popular?"

"Yeah, that's the other thing. The Northern Ontario Ikkyu clone fell for Frank, and it broke his heart when she married Frank instead. So he left Northern Ontario, and the other twelve Franks, and moved to rural Saskatchewan right away. But it was way too crowded for him there, and it snapped his mind. So, he'd be the obvious choice, even if he _is_ more flamboyantly evil than the last Ikkyu. I seem to remember him doing a lot of evil laughs at the Christmas party."

"Wow…" Yomiko commented, quite at a loss.

"Of course, it could also be the Easter Island one. Or the one in rural Manitoba. Of course, that's less likely. He didn't give that one a hat."

"And…the hat is important?" Yomiko asked, wondering how many more times her confusion could increase tenfold without rupturing the fabric of time and space.

"It had some special significance to him, I guess. You know, men and their little toys."

"Oh, don't I," Wendy said grimly. "I know all too well how a man can lose all interest in everything else once something new and exciting comes along."

"What's she talking about?" Nancy murmured to Yomiko.

"She's…having a bit of a personal crisis right now," Yomiko replied, expression sympathy mingled with utter bafflement.

"Oh, Joker, you bastard!" Wendy was meanwhile wailing, before running, weeping, up the steps and into the building.

"Uh…" Nancy began, before shaking her head. "No, never mind. I don't want to know."

* * *

"Hey, guys!" Yomiko greeted Joker and Joe cheerfully as she and Nancy entered the office, from which the rich scent of freshly brewed coffee seemed to be drifting. "Guess who I ran into!"

"I really don't think this is a good idea," Nancy told her. "They don't exactly remember me in a good light. Switching sides halfway through the mission leaves a bad last impression, you know."

"Well, I know you were really on our side," Yomiko said, eyes wide and serious.

"Well, actually-" Nancy began to reply, only to be cut off by an angry exclamation.

"What the hell's going on?!" a burly blond man whom many of us will know as Drake Anderson demanded, nearly spilling his coffee in his shock. Of course, the coffee-spilling may have only been due to his badly shaking hand, the result of the eight cups he had drunk already. "Aren't you supposed to be in some hospital?"

"That's my clone. 'Little sister'. Whatever," Nancy explained patiently.

"Oh, my," Joker murmured. Then, setting down his coffee cup with a shaky hand, he asked thoughtfully, "Well, if this is the case, how exactly did you manage to get out of the rocket, and back here?"

"Uh…um…well…uh…hey, look over there!"

As Joker, Drake, and Joe, as well as Yomiko, who apparently took a few tries to learn a lesson, looked curiously in the direction Nancy indicated, she bolted from the room, and the next moment, five very confused people watched through a window as she darted from the building, toward the nearest parked vehicle, and the next moment, the sound of a revving car engine filled the air.

"Uh…what?" Joker asked rather vaguely.

"I think I've seen her somewhere before," Joe was meanwhile reflecting thoughtfully.

Several seconds later…

"Hey, that was my car!" Drake exclaimed, charging from the room.

* * *

"Never do that again," he growled when, ten minutes later, he stalked angrily back into Joker's office, and poured himself a cup of coffee to help himself calm down, despite the utter irony of this ridiculous statement.

"Sorry," Nancy said, just a wee bit contritely, as she followed. "It's a reflex."

"What a weird reflex," Joe commented. Then, as he stared thoughtfully at Nancy, he continued. "I'm sure I know you." Finally, a nearly visible light broke over his face. "Oh, right! Skim milk latte, two artificial sweeteners, and cinnamon flecks! And latte with two-percent and whipped cream and chocolate flecks on special occasions!"

"That's got to be the weirdest thing I've ever been called," Nancy said, rather bewildered.

"What the hell is with this guy?" Drake muttered under his breath. "Hey, do you seriously only know people by how they take their coffee?"

Joe looked up.

"I'm sorry; what was that, strong-black-coffee-with-four-sugars-and-a-dollop-of-evaporated-milk?"

"Look at it this way, Mister Drake," Joker said, not entirely liking the way their new friend was being disparaged. "Joe is very good at what he does."

"Too bad it's the only thing," Drake rejoined with a smirk. "Still, it is damn good coffee. Hey, pass another cup over here, would you, Joe?"

"So, what do you do if you meet someone who doesn't drink coffee?" Yomiko asked.

"Doesn't drink coffee?!" Joe repeated, aghast, nearly dropping Drake's cup in shock. "Does such a creature exist?"

"Well…I don't drink coffee," she admitted slowly and thoughtfully.

Joe gibbered incoherently for a moment, and then pulled himself together.

"Okay, Joe, calm down," he commanded himself. "Just because you've just found out that your personal safety has been in the hands of some non-coffee-drinking nutcase for the last three days, there's no reason to panic." Then he turned back to her. "Well, you drink tea, right?"

"Sometimes, I guess…"

"How about hot cocoa?"

"Only at Christmas," she replied apologetically.

"Hot water with lemon?"

"Yuck."

"Steamed milk?"

"Steamed…what?"

"Hot lemonade?"

"Does Neo Citron when I get a cold count?"

"How about this: have you ever eaten your soup in a mug?"

"No, I eat my soup from the little Styrofoam containers I buy it in."

Joe looked devastated.

"I'm afraid I have nothing more to say to you, then."

A pause.

"But you're still going to give me that copy of Moby Dick, right?"

"Oh, brother," Drake grumbled. "Look, I've had a long day. Traffic was terrible, the flight over was nothing great, and then, once I got here, I had my rental car stolen-"

"You sure hold a grudge, don't you?" Nancy noted resentfully.

"I'd really just like to find out what the hell we're supposed to be doing, and why the hell I have to be doing it," the gruff, crusty pottery guy continued, utterly ignoring the interruption.

"Yes, of course. How silly of me," Joker said sheepishly.

_I think all the coffee is eating his brain,_ Yomiko noted silently. _I'd better tell Wendy about this._

"At any rate," he continued, "I might as well make it known that, as of today, Joe is officially our new coffee guy."

A sharp gasp from the door drew everyone's attention that way. Wendy, who had just appeared with an armload of papers, immediately dropped them, and to cover up, made a show of tripping over them.

"Goodness, I'm sorry," she called with a horribly forced little laugh, gathering the papers together again and wondering what on earth she would do all day, now that the other half of her job description of fetching and filing papers and making tea for Mr. Joker had been assigned elsewhere. If this meant a reduction in her hours! How on earth would she pay her rent? She'd have to sing at her landlord about how she was "not gonna paaaaa-aaaaaaay last year's rent, this year's rent, next year's rent," and so forth! And, as everyone knew, _nothing_ good ever came of random musical interludes!

"Are you okay, miss?" Joe asked, alarmed.

"Just fine, thank-you," Wendy replied icily.

"Goodness, Wendy, are you sure you're feeling all right?" Joker asked, rising from his desk with a concerned expression. "I've never known you to be so out-of-sorts. Perhaps you're coming down with something."

"Ugh," Nancy groaned, shaking her head in despair as a nearly visible wave of the silliest drama-substitute possible crashed down upon the group.

"No, no, I'm perfectly all right, Mr. Joker," Wendy hastened to assure him, smiling valiantly.

"Still, perhaps you ought to take another short break. Will you join us for a cup of coffee?"

"No, I don't think I'll do that, thank-you," she replied through gritted teeth.

"Well, then, perhaps you ought to go have a cup of tea."

"Y-yes, I think I'll do that," Wendy agreed. Then she continued hopefully. "Would anyone else like one?"

With a sad little sigh as everyone replied that no, they were just fine with their coffee, or their lack of any hot beverage whatsoever, Wendy tried to slip quietly from the office, tripped over a box left in the middle of the floor, and pitched head-first into a bookshelf.

As an avalanche of books began to cover her, Joe, who had been regarding her thoughtfully since she had announced her intention of going to get a cup of tea, leapt to his feet and tried to haul her out of the pile, only to lose his balance and slam into the bookshelf again, causing the remaining fourteen books to bounce squarely off his head one by one.

"Sorry about that," Joe laughed nervously from his position both on top of Wendy and beneath several large, heavy books.

"Not at all," she replied with a slow, deliberate calmness that barely masked a rather alarming degree of fury.

Finally realizing exactly what those pleasantly warm, rather pillowesque things directly beneath his hands were, Joe leapt back in horror, face brilliantly red, nose beginning to bleed ever so slightly.

"What a stunning display of stupidity," Drake muttered, staring in perverse fascination as both tried to get up, and simultaneously slipped on stray books, only to land in an even more tangled heap on the floor.

"Now, now, let's not be too hard on them," Joker tried to say lightly.

"I don't think you possibly _could_ be too hard on that guy," Nancy commented, perhaps rather unfairly, as the initial accident had been Wendy's, whether or not Joe had made it far worse than it needed to be. But danmit, Joe was the man, and everyone knew that everything in the world was a man's fault! The only reason the poor girl had tripped and crashed into the bookshelf was because the idiot _man_ had put her into a disastrous mental state!

During this lengthy bit of narration, Wendy had scrambled to her feet, attempting to salvage what dignity remained, and began to gather together some of the nearest books.

"Oh, don't worry about those, Wendy," Joker hastened to say. "I'll look after them later. Why don't you go have that cup of tea and try to feel better?"

"Yeah! I'll go with you!" Joe suggested eagerly.

"Right. That'll make her feel a lot better," Nancy said lightly as Wendy visibly swallowed back a wave of horrified anger at this idea.

Yomiko, finally tearing her horrified gaze away from the books strewn about the floor, frowned in confusion.

"But…wasn't she upset because-"

"No, she's upset because she just got pinned under a bookshelf," Nancy hastened to interrupt. After all, if too much got revealed now, they'd have to come up with another silly side-story, and she had the horrifying feeling that it could only get worse.

"No, no, I'm sure she was upset because of Mr.-"

"Trust me. It's the bookshelf."

Yomiko blinked, then readjusted her glasses.

"Oh. Okay, then."

"Well, that's very nice of you, Joe," Joker was meanwhile saying. "In fact, I would rather like for you two to get to know one another."

"Of…of course," Wendy agreed with a very forced smile.

"Cool!" Joe beamed. "And hey, maybe I can give you some pointers to improve your tea technique! If I can work my magic with coffee, I can work my magic with tea, baby!"

"Yes, perhaps," Wendy agreed again with a smile so forced it more resembled a grimace of the sort of pain one feels while giving birth to a thistle patch.

"How nice," Joker beamed after Wendy and Joe as the two left the office, Joe chattering animatedly about something or other, and Wendy trying very hard not to save the I-jin some trouble by strangling him with a spare bit of thread from her travel sewing kit. "I'm certain they'll be the best of friends in no time. Now, as I was saying, the point of bringing you two – " Here, Joker nodded toward Drake and Yomiko in turn. " – not to mention Joe, is to keep him safe from his former employers, who wish to kill him."

"Why?" Drake asked, bewildered.

"Do you mean, why do his former employers wish to kill him?" Joker asked.

Drake hesitated.

"Sure, if you like."

"Er, very well. As I see it, they wish to keep the man's skill from the rest of humanity, as they do not believe the rest of humanity worthy of drinking coffee of such high quality."

"Wow…they've really run out of things to do," Yomiko said decidedly.

"Be that as it may, Agent Paper, it is now your and Mister Drake's duty to keep Joe safe from the I-Jin. You will find and eliminate the assassin teams that are currently searching for him."

"Do we have to keep him safe from his own stupidity, too?" Drake asked.

"Er, yes," Joker replied.

"Damn," Drake grumbled. "They don't pay me enough for this. I've gotta babysit not only her – " He gestured toward Yomiko. " – but that coffee-obsessed idiot? And don't tell me; she's along for the ride, too," he finished in disgust, gesturing toward Nancy.

"Well, as long as she's here, she might as well be!" Joker said brightly.

"What?! Hey, does 'complete betrayal' ring any bells to you?" Drake asked angrily.

Joker thought carefully.

"No, not really," he finally answered.

"Okay, no more coffee for you," Drake proclaimed, yanking away the other man's coffee mug.

Joker suppressed a sad whimper, but, as his hand shook uncontrollably, decided that perhaps it was for the best.

"Um, Mr. Joker?" a timid voice piped up.

He looked up at the source, and sighed at the sight of Yomiko fidgeting nervously, casting worried glances in the direction of the bookshelf.

"Yes, Yomiko, you may go pick up the books."

With a relieved sigh, she leapt from her seat and began gathering up the various heavy tomes scattered about the floor.

"It'll be okay," she assured one particularly battered book, stroking it soothingly before putting it back on the shelf.

"Damn it, why me?" Drake whimpered.

* * *

End Notes: Whoo! A rewrite! Glaring continuity errors have now gone the way of the old moon! Or something... :o)


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

-----------------------------------------------

As the unfortunate Mister Drake was busily and plaintively pondering exactly why Fate was picking on him, this sentiment was echoed by a certain young woman in the lunch room.

Along with that eternal cry of despair and desolation, Wendy was also wondering just how long she could continue pasting on this fake smile before her face started to crack.

Still, if she started being outright mean to Joe, he might suspect all the nasty things she had already planned to do to him.

That, and Joker might get angry.

That would be bad.

And so, there she sat at the table in the lunch room, periodically smiling and nodding politely in response to the excruciatingly cheerful stream of chatter spilling forth from the nondescript, sandy-haired young man who was currently trying to figure out all the subtle ways that coffee differed from tea in its proper methods of construction.

Joe, meanwhile, was feeling quite as though he had died and gone to heaven.

There was a beautiful girl, and _blonde_ on top of that, who apparently shared his love of the hot beverage, hanging on his every word! That smile she was giving him was unmistakeable: she was feelin' it, too!

Never one to waste a moment once an opportunity had come his way – unless, of course, he had failed to notice the approaching opportunity, or was busy making or drinking coffee at the time, or was in the bathroom, or asleep, or something – Joe picked up a steaming mug of tea in each hand and swept over to the table.

Smiling one more overly-polite smile that would, of course, be utterly misinterpreted, Wendy picked up the cup of tea he set down in front of her, and sipped carefully with very much the air of someone drinking lemon juice for no other reason than the sake of not insulting their host.

Pushing his cup to the side of the table, Joe took Wendy's very startled free hand in his.

"How do you like it?" he asked tenderly. "The tea, I mean."

"It-it's good. Very nice tea," she replied uncomfortably, dually wondering if this sort of person could be dangerous and if she could fight her way out if he should prove so, and reflecting vehemently that there was no way she was telling this possibly dangerous idiot that his tea was perfection in a mug.

"Wendy," he began resolutely, tugging her hand closer and eliciting a small shriek as she found herself hauled halfway across the table. "Would you like to meet me for dinner some night soon?"

She made an incoherent noise of surprise, disbelief, and outright anger. Who did this…this…THING think he was?! As though it weren't enough that he should alienate the affections of her…ahem…boss, then he had to try for the affections of her…well, of her _her__! _

_I need some better dramatic inner monologue,_ she decided sadly.

Then, turning her attention to Joe, who had been watching her with clasped hands and wide, hopeful eyes, she glared at him frostily and prepared to tell him exactly what he could do with his dinner-date invitation.

Now, if these peoples' lives were anything like those of normal folks, it is likely that Wendy would have done just that, and Joe would have been inconsolable for ten seconds until he remembered that there was a cup of tea at his elbow, waiting to be enjoyed.

This part of everyone's lives would have remained peaceful, instead of providing irritating and silly backdrop for the main events.

It is a lucky thing that these peoples' lives are not like those of normal people, is it not?

Just as Wendy had formulated a properly chilling (but still polite) reply to Joe's burning question, Joker happened past the lunch room on his way to the only natural place for a person to rush to after eight strong cups of coffee in a day, let alone the hour that it had taken him to finish them.

As the blond man peeked into the lunch room and smiled fondly at the two, Wendy was struck with a diabolical inspiration.

"Of course, Joe," she said loudly for the benefit of the eavesdropper, shooting the man sitting across from her a charming smile before she could talk herself out of it. "Shall we meet this Friday if you're still in town then?"

She inwardly cackled in delight as Joker, who had passed the doorway, back-pedalled at this, peeking back into the room, and seeming quite interested in Joe's answer, if interest were measured in the narrowing of eyes.

"It's a date!" Joe agreed jubilantly, eyes sparkly. Then he leapt from the table. "I have to go get ready!"

"Joe, Friday is three days…away," Wendy finished as Joe bolted from the room. "Oh, well."

Then, pretending to notice the slightly annoyed man in the doorway for the first time, she rose from the table.

"Oh, hello, Mr. Joker," she greeted with an innocent smile.

"Hello, Wendy," he returned with slightly strained cheerfulness. "Having a date on Friday, are you?"

She nodded.

His mouth tightened ever so slightly.

"Yes, well, that's very nice."

"I thought so," she said brightly. "He's a nice boy."

Joker chuckled, seeming to relax slightly.

"Boy? Wendy, he's at least three years older than you."

She stared.

"Really?"

He nodded with a slightly wry smile.

"He just isn't terribly mature, I'm afraid."

"I think his air of boyish innocence is refreshing," she said airily, folding her arms.

"If you like baby-sitting, perhaps," Joker grumbled before recalling that, although women could be very aggravating indeed, he was still British, and exceedingly so, and thus under necessity of being polite.

"That isn't very nice!" Wendy protested.

_Neither is pretending to be someone's friend and showing them how to make the perfect coffee, and then turning on them like this_, he refrained from saying out loud, instead choosing to chuckle and say,

"No, I suppose it isn't. I'll apologize to Joe when I see him next. Now, if you're feeling better, I believe there is something for you to be doing. So, run along."

"Of course, sir," she sighed, reflecting a wee bit mournfully that men were exceedingly difficult to deal with just as soon as a girl tried to level the playing-field a little and scare a reaction from them.

Joker watched her go, waiting carefully until she was out of earshot. Then he turned and glared with such ferocity at the two mugs, still half-full, sitting on the table, that they nearly shattered. Luckily, though, Joker had no latent psychic powers, and was thus spared the task of cleaning up the kind of mess that this would have caused.

Nevertheless, although he was not _psychic_, he was fully able to turn a little _psycho_ when the situation required it. Thus, he clenched one fist tightly in a manner that would have provoked either terror or deep amusement in any normal person who beheld it.

"It seems that you have some very important lessons to learn about staying away from other men's…er…assistants, Joe. Unfortunately, I am not a very patient teacher, and if I find out that you have so much as touched her, the lesson will be that much more painful."

He struck a menacing pose for about four seconds, lightning and thunder filling the air above him due to the odd problems the building had been having with their lighting and ventilation systems as of late.

Then a pained expression crossed his face as he recalled suddenly what he had left his office for in the first place, and he darted from the room and in the direction of the nearest restroom.

-----------------------------------------------------

"Where the hell is Joker?" Drake grumbled, arms crossed, leaning against a wall.

"In the little boys' room," Nancy replied dryly. "What did you expect, after all that damn coffee?"

Drake pushed off the wall and glared at her.

"Yeah, well—"

He stopped abruptly as a pained look crossed his face, sweat beading on his forehead.

"I'll be back, alright? If Joker gets back, tell him I had to go to the bank or something. I don't want him knowing I can't hold my coffee," he concluded with a wry smirk before bolting frantically from the room.

Nancy sighed, and then looked over at the only other person still in Joker's office. Making a quick decision, she leaned over in her chair and snatched the tome of wisdom from Yomiko, making sure to keep the page marked with one finger.

"Hey! What – oh, hi, Nancy. Are we starting?" Yomiko asked, eyes wide and earnest.

"No," Nancy replied flatly. "Joe's still off somewhere, sealing his own fate by trying to teach that secretary girl the art of making good tea, and Drake and Joker are both learning some hard lessons about the side-effects of too much coffee."

Yomiko nodded slowly, digesting all this.

"Oh, I see."

Then, after another long pause…

"So…can I have my book back?"

"Later," Nancy said firmly. "If we're the only ones here, I'm not sitting here and watching you read."

"Well…what do we do instead?" Yomiko asked hesitantly.

"Oh, I don't know," Nancy replied with a sardonic smile. "Talk?"

"Hmm…yeah, I guess we could do that. So, Nancy, if Joe is the official I-Jin coffee guy—"

"Was," Nancy interjected.

"Right. If Joe _was_ the official I-Jin coffee guy, does that mean you knew him pretty well?"

"I drank coffee every now and then," Nancy shrugged. "That's really the only time I talked to him. Although, he did ask me out every now and again, even though he told me it couldn't ever go anywhere because I wasn't 'blonde' enough for him. Really knew how to sweet-talk a girl..."

Yomiko nodded thoughtfully, feeling that this last bit answered her next question quite satisfactorily.

"So…was he always like this?"

"Like what? You mean, an idiot?"

"Well...more like a not-so-smart person," Yomiko replied.

Nancy thought about this carefully.

"Yeah, he really was. Except, I think he's gotten a little better. I remember him clearly being very, very good at coffee and everything to do with it. Unfortunately, very little in the average day actually has to do with coffee, and Joe was a bit of a disaster with everything else." She shuddered. "I still remember the time someone uttered the fatal words, 'could you finish mopping in here, Joe?'"

"Uh-oh," Yomiko said sadly.

"Yeah," Nancy agreed emphatically. "They may have gotten all the windows fixed by now, but I doubt it. And I'm sure that poor yak hasn't found its way home yet."

"Yak?" the bespectacled girl repeated, bewildered.

Nancy put a hand out to stop her.

"Don't think about it, Yomiko. If you try to make it make sense, you'll only make yourself dizzy."

"Okay," Yomiko agreed. Then, casting the other woman a few shy, sideways glances, she continued. "Um, Nancy?"

"Yeah?"

"You know that question you keep avoiding?"

Nancy's expression grew nervous, and she fidgeted slightly in her chair.

"Uh, what question is that?"

"How did you get out of that rocket?"

The taller girl's expression went from nervous to full-blown panic.

"Uh…um…uh…hey, look over there!"

As Yomiko looked, thus proving that her short-term memory was very, very short indeed, Nancy leapt silently from her chair and bolted from the room, nearly crashing headlong into Joe, who was in the process of waltzing dreamily through the door.

"Wow…where's she going in such a hurry?" the young man asked absently.

Yomiko simply stared out the window, crestfallen, as a midnight-blue convertible sped down the street, car alarm jangling frantically.

"Nancy just ran away again," she sighed. "And she still had my book!"

"I don't really see the problem," Joe admitted, eyeing the shelves upon shelves of books lining the room.

He smiled a dreamy smile as his gaze lit on one somewhat disorganized bookshelf, filled with rather battered books, the site of his first real interaction with 'his girl', as Wendy would undoubtedly have violently resented being called. Oh, she was cute when she was flustered! Hair all mussed and dishevelled…just imagine away the clothes…eheh…best to save thoughts like that for a little later. Like after the second date.

With this final decision firmly in his mind, Joe turned to find the puzzled gazes of Yomiko, a newly returned Nancy, and Drake fixed upon him.

"Um, Mr. Joe? Are you okay? You look like you're feverish or something," Yomiko pointed out.

"And drooling heavily," Drake added.

"Yeah," Nancy agreed, shooting Yomiko a slightly mischievous smile. "I don't see too many people react that way to a good book."

"Nancy!" Yomiko protested.

"Actually, I gots a date with an angel Friday night!" Joe announced proudly.

"Oh!" Yomiko said, blinking. "I guess Wendy will be happy."

"Not asking," Drake muttered, pointedly ignoring the conversation.

Joe grinned, blushing a little.

"Aw, did she tell you she liked me? What a sweet, demure little thing! Too shy to ask me out first…"

Nancy raised one eyebrow slightly.

"Uh, what?"

"Not asking," Drake muttered again, ignoring the conversation with slightly weakening determination.

"Yeah! While we were drinking tea together, something just went 'click', and I had to ask her out!"

"And…she accepted," Nancy surmised flatly.

"Not asking," Drake nearly whimpered with the effort it was by this point to ignore the conversation. After all, Drake enjoyed gossip as much as the next gruff, crusty pottery-makin' bad-ass.

Joe nodded enthusiastically.

"Sure did!"

"I've gotta ask one thing," Drake said slowly, utterly giving up on ignoring what stood to become nearly interesting. "Does this mean that keeping this idiot safe from Joker is part of our mission now?"

"I guess we'll have to ask Mr. Joker when he gets back," Yomiko said seriously.

Drake, Nancy, and Joe were all silent for a moment.

Finally…

"No, forget it. It's not worth the trouble," Drake said flatly.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

End Notes: Hello! Well, this is a long-overdue update. [Rubs back of head sheepishly] Still, I don't forsee the next chapter taking so long to get churned out. I'm kind of in the middle of a Read or Die re-obsession right now. :o)

Anyway, thanks to anyone who's still reading! [Waves cheerfully, then scampers away after a bunny]


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

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Life was not going well for Ikkyu.

When his week had begun with the loss of his favourite coffee guy, he had known that it wouldn't be a good one, but never, ever would he have been able to predict the pain, the aggravation, the fatigue, and the sheer inconvenience that the days ahead would hold.

He glared at the young carrot-top, the fifth clone of Peter he had made that week, who was obviously waiting for a response to his suggestion as to the best candidate for the new assassin team.

"Everyone," he began through gritted teeth, "I would like you to all think very carefully about this for a moment. Can anyone tell Peter where the problem lies in his suggestion that we send a team comprised of clones of King Arthur after our runaway coffee guy?"

One oldish man with a sizeable bald spot and grey tufts of hair over his ears raised his hand tentatively.

"Yes, Steve? Go ahead."

"Well, King Arthur would have no knowledge of modern technology, and might be disoriented for a time."

"Also," the girl with the long brown ponytail added, beaming proudly at her own intelligence of complex psychology, "as a king, he would have little experience with taking orders."

Ikkyu was silent for a long, long moment.

"Not exactly, Cindy," he said coolly. "It has more to do with the fact that _King Arthur never existed! _Now, I assume that you can all see the problem that this poses."

Ten recently cloned scientists (or rather, clones thereof, as the originals, or at least the previous clones, had mysteriously disappeared) nodded mutely.

"Excellent," Ikkyu said a wee bit sarcastically. "I'm glad that we won't have to hold a brief seminar on the nature of reality versus fiction. And now that we have that cleared up, does anyone else have a suggestion as to whom we might clone and send after Joe?"

Cindy waved her hand frantically in the air.

"Mr. Ikkyu, I have an idea!"

"Go ahead, Cindy," Ikkyu said, much relieved.

After all, Cindy was a woman, and if he knew one thing, it was that women were always, _always_ much smarter than men. At this thought, Ikkyu blinked, and then internally shook his head.

_I've been living in this universe too long_, he thought sadly, just in time to nearly miss Cindy's suggestion.

"I think we should send Erik after Joe!"

Ikkyu raised one eyebrow.

"Erik, you say? The young man at the reception desk?"

"No!" Cindy exclaimed as impatiently as it was safe to get with one's boss, particularly when said boss had a tendency to clone and then kill those who annoyed him. "I mean Erik! The Phantom of the Opera! He was brilliant, and he had the voice of an angel, and he was really, really sexy!"

"Wasn't he hideously deformed?" Peter asked, scratching his head.

"And psychotic?" Steve added.

"Well, yeah," Cindy shrugged defensively. "But on the inside, he was really sexy!"

"Only if you're a gay man," one particularly crass young man named Alan, who truly never knew when to keep his mouth shut, snickered.

"Cindy," Ikkyu began slowly. "I fail to see how the Phantom of the Opera would be of use to us."

"Sir, Erik was brilliant! And he was really, really devious! He'd catch Joe for us in no time! And all that rage really motivated him to get things done!"

"But wasn't his rage confined to those who thought he was ugly?" Steve asked.

"You could just make him really, really ugly, so he could be enraged with everyone," Cindy suggested hopefully, eyes growing shiny at the thought of twenty Phantoms of the Opera hanging about headquarters for her to swoon over.

"A very good idea, Cindy," Ikkyu said pleasantly, with the sort of pleasantness that tended to characterize his tone just before someone died. "There remains only one problem. Think back, if you will, my dear, to exactly what the problem would have been with twenty clones of King Arthur."

Cindy thought about this. Then, gradually, her face fell.

"Oh, right. The not-existing thing."

Ikkyu closed his eyes and counted slowly to ten.

"Yes, Cindy. The non-existing thing."

"I know!" the scientist arbitrarily named Dan said excitedly. "We should use Count Dracula!"

"Yeah!" Cindy squealed. "He's really sexy, too!"

"And he can drink Joe's blood," Dan added.

Peter looked dubious.

"But then he'd get all hyper from the coffee we put in Joe's blood. I don't know, guys. A really hyper vampire just seems kind of dangerous to me."

Something snapped in Ikkyu's brain at this. His smile widened by a bit.

"Hey, why don't we take a break for a while? I'll take you all to see my weapon collection…"

--------------------------------------------------

"Um, Mr. Joker?" Yomiko spoke up hesitantly, breaking the rather uncomfortable silence in the office.

Interrupted from his reverie, which had taken the form of a death-glare in Joe's direction, Joker looked up abruptly.

"Yes, Agent Paper? What is it?"

"Are we…are we going to _do _anything at any point?"

"Yeah," Drake grumbled in agreement. "You dragged us all the way here, and now all we're doing is sitting in your office, not talking."

"We're simply waiting for the I-Jin to make their first move," Joker said, returning to the unruffled politeness more common to him. "Until they make their next appearance, there is little we can do. After all," he continued with a chuckle, "we can't very well protect Joe from the I-Jin if the I-Jin aren't threatening him in any way."

"Wait a minute," Yomiko began slowly, frowning slightly. "When I first met Joe, he said there were guys after him already! If the I-Jin aren't doing anything, what were you running from?"

"Hey, you try living with the suspicion that there are people after you at all times!" Joe exclaimed defensively. "So I panicked a little, and maybe those two groups of kids in white t-shirts and jean jackets and pompadours that advanced on each other snapping their fingers weren't I-Jin, but darnit! They could have been!"

At this, an even more uncomfortable silence fell over the room as Drake, Nancy, and Joker glared daggers at Joe.

Yomiko simply blinked big blue eyes in confusion.

"Well…they _could_ have been, Mr. Joe, but I think you definitely overreacted."

"Great," Drake spat, standing up from his chair so abruptly that it flew back across the room and nearly took out the ever-unfortunate Wendy who had chosen just that moment to peek unobtrusively into the room to be sure that she wouldn't interrupt any particularly gripping and important meetings by entering just then.

Or, at least, to be sure that Joe wasn't there.

"Ack!" she shrieked, ducking out of the way of the apparently possessed chair.

"Hey, sorry," Drake called over his shoulder before returning his attention to Joe.

"No trouble at all," she called back weakly before staggering away, presumably to trip over something.

"So, what you're saying is that there are really no I-Jin after you, and you're just too paranoid for your own good."

"Or maybe," Joe said tersely, glancing about the room nervously, "I'm not paranoid enough."

"No, I definitely think you're too paranoid, Joe," Yomiko said gently.

Joe took on a wounded expression.

"I was trying to have a dramatic moment."

"Well, don't," Nancy suggested flatly.

"Fine," the coffee-guy pouted.

"Either way," Joker said authoritatively, thinking it high time that this runaway train of silliness got back on track, "I think it is still premature to assume that there are no I-Jin after Joe. Particularly when we have come across several already."

"What?!" Drake exclaimed. "We've been attacked by I-Jin already and you didn't capture them?"

"No, we have come across them," Joker corrected. "Earlier today, Marianne reported having been served a pastry by Mary Wollstonecraft, who apparently didn't possess the proper qualities to be a member of an assassin team."

"Hmph. I'd think a feminist like that'd be a great assassin, as long as the target's a man," Drake muttered, only to receive a frosty glare from Nancy.

"And I'm all man," Joe announced proudly, grinning at Wendy, who was beginning to have severe reservations about entering Joker's office that day, as this was the second time that decided misfortune had befallen her immediately upon doing so. "Right, babe?"

"I-I wouldn't know," Wendy replied through gritted teeth.

"But you will," Joe assured her with a wink.

"Errrrgh," Joker said calmly, just as calmly tightening his hands around the armrests of his chair and nearly prying them off.

"Right," Wendy murmured weakly, setting a stack of files down on a free inch of space on Joker's desk, where they immediately tipped over and scattered about the floor. With a despairing sigh, she began to collect them, and continued. "I just came to drop this off. And predictably all over the floor, apparently. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm just going to slip into the other room and hide in a hole in the wall, praying for merciful death."

Joker looked up.

"As long as you're taking a break, Wendy, why not work on…er, what we discussed earlier?"

Wendy thought carefully about this.

"But…don't you need to be there, too?"

"Not that," Joker replied through gritted teeth, feeling quite as though this day should have ended long ago – perhaps yesterday.

Wendy thought carefully again, and then brightened.

"Oh, right! Although, I did have one question."

"Yes, what is it?"

"Are we going to be flamboyant-evil, or realistic-evil?"

"Realistic-evil," Joker replied. "Definitely realistic-evil. As toned-down as you can keep it."

"Oh," Wendy said, looking mildly disappointed. "So, does that mean I ought to return the long, flowing black velvet cape and leather bathing suit and pointy black boots and whip?"

"No, no, don't do that," Joker hastened to reply as Joe clamped both hands to his face to stem his sudden nosebleed, Drake and Nancy highly disturbed glances, and Yomiko picked up the nearest book and finished the fourth chapter fifteen seconds later. "They still might come in handy."

"Well, if you say so," Wendy shrugged. "I'll just keep them in my closet for now."

"Yes, do that. And by the way, try to get through as much of this as you can tonight," Joker said, voice muffled as he disappeared for a moment behind his desk, and the next moment emerged with a massive tome that seemed to send an electric jolt through Yomiko.

"Big book," she noted in awe.

Joker sighed.

"Yes, it is, Yomiko."

"Can I see?" she asked pleadingly.

"Perhaps you can read it once Wendy's finished with it."

"No, you can give it to her now," Wendy said hastily, eyeing what was easily two thousand pages, all for the sake of a gag. The Oxford Book of Balance, indeed!

Eyes shiny, Yomiko leapt forward and made a grab for the book.

"Ack!" she intoned sadly as suddenly, the book was no longer there to grab for.

Shaking his head sadly, Joker turned to the blonde still embarking upon the futile quest of tidying up an office that had won prestigious awards for its sheer disorganization.

"Wendy, do try to get through as much as you can tonight. After all," he added thoughtfully, as one to whom a very good idea had just occurred, "I'd hate to see you have to stay in Friday evening to finish it."

"At least one of us would," she sighed, casting a pained look at Joe, who was busily brewing another pot of coffee and humming the theme from the Folgers commercials, somehow in four-part harmony.

Then she smiled brightly around the room, failed utterly to catch the heavy volume Joker tossed to her, uttered a dismayed squeak as she was pinned to the floor under its weight, and crawled away, dragging it after her and muttering angrily about everything in the universe, reflecting as she went that finding the motivation to turn suddenly evil might not be so difficult as she imagined.

"So," Drake said briskly once the door had clicked softly shut behind Wendy, "we actually doing anything today or not?"

Joker made a helpless gesture.

"Honestly, Drake, if the I-Jin don't try anything, we have no reason to."

"Well, instead of sitting around here and waiting, I'm going to find something nice for my daughter. And to draw my fortune for today. I get shaky and irritable if I don't do it at least once a day," he confided before tromping from the room.

"Yeah, I guess there's no reason to stay here all night," Nancy shrugged, watching him go. "Yomiko? You want to go find a place to stay for the night?"

"Hmm," Yomiko murmured absently, flipping a page.

"Uh…Yomiko?"

No response, save for another page being flipped.

"Yomiko!"

Another page.

Lips tightening, Nancy pondered for a moment what was to be done about this, and then stood up, walked around behind Yomiko's chair, and rested her chin on the other girl's shoulder.

"What're you reading?"

Yomiko went very still at the question, asked from directly next to her ear.

"Um…reading? What?" she asked a little dizzily, two little red spots appearing on her cheeks.

Nancy straightened up, shaking her head with a fond sigh.

"Nothing. You want to get out of here?"

"Well, I guess," Yomiko said doubtfully. "Is that okay, Mr. Joker?"

"Of course," the blond man smiled. "I'll be in touch to let you know when we find something."

"Okay!" Yomiko chirped. "So, what should we do?"

"I don't know," Nancy said. "Any ideas?"

"Oh, dear. She's sealed her own fate," Joker noted aside, amused.

Yomiko thought carefully.

"There's a really good bookstore near here," she said slowly. "Not nearly as good as Toto Books, but I've still heard good things about it. Um…would it be okay if we went to take a look?"

Nancy looked dubious.

"Just one bookstore?"

Yomiko looked sheepish.

"Well…"

---------------------------------------------------------------

The laboratory was dark, save for the light cast by the flickering flame of the (badly-set) Bunsen burner.

One lone shadowy figure moved about stealthily, trying for grace and silence, but simply looking vaguely like a cartoon villain creeping around to the sound of a string orchestra playing a very staccato-ish piece.

"I don't care what Mr. Ikkyu said," the figure hissed to herself. "I _will_ have my Erik! I _will _find a way! All I have to do is combine the wit of Oscar Wilde, the strategic brilliance of Napoleon, the scientific vision of Leonardo Da Vinci, the musical genius of Bach, and the appearance of John Merrick! And soon, the Phantom of the Opera will be mine!"

With that, Cindy threw back her head and foolishly let loose a melodramatically evil laugh.

The next moment, as the sound of pounding footsteps down the corridor grew louder, she uttered a dismayed squeak and dove under the table.

"Mine, I tell you!" she whispered from her position under the lab bench as the door swung open and several very bewildered people noted that the room was, indeed, empty. "All mine!"

-----------------------------------------------------

End Notes: Hmm…I don't know if this Phantom of the Opera sort-of-clone will play a large part in the action, or if he'll just be a silly one-gag character who then fades into the woodwork. Either way, thanks for the interest, please leave a review, and I hope you enjoyed! Y'know, the usual stuff. :o)


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

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"I'm in a bookstore. It's the seventeenth one I've seen in the past four hours. I'm loaded down with what's got to be two hundred pounds of books, and it looks like the load's going to increase, because Yomiko looks about ready to drop, although it isn't stopping her from buying more. We've still got to catch a cab and get to the hotel before the managers decide 'to Hell with the British Library' and give the room Joker booked for us, to someone else. Strangely enough, I'm having the time of my life."

Yomiko turned from the shelf, her arms full of intended purchases.

"What did you say, Nancy?"

"Uh, nothing," Nancy replied innocently, one hand frantically shooing the cameraman to whom she had been delivering her monologue.

"Oh; I thought you had called me," Yomiko said, shooting the other girl a smile before turning her full attention back to the business of book-shopping.

"That was Yomiko," Nancy said, addressing the cameraman, who had just crept back out of the Vegetarian Cooking section. "She loves books. Like, more than breathing. And…and why am I doing this again?"

"I think it's because we're really bored," the cameraman replied seriously.

"Right," Nancy sighed. "So, what did you say your name was?"

"Uh…I didn't," he said quickly, edging towards the door and shutting off his camera.

"Hold on," Nancy said in a tone that brooked no argument, as a frown creased her forehead. "You look familiar."

"I…I do?" the man laughed nervously, readjusting his thick black glasses which, oddly enough, caused his mustache, the black of which did not match his sandy-brown hair in any way, and his massive nose, to bob a little.

"Yeah," Nancy replied, peering at him more closely. "For some reason, when I look at you, I really want a cup of coffee."

"Um…uh…I can't imagine why," the utterly nondescript, yet vaguely familiar man laughed nervously.

"Hi, Joe," Yomiko greeted, turning from the bookshelf with an armload of books that had managed to double since the last time she had torn herself from her browsing. "What's with the fake glasses and mustache and nose?"

"Oh, it's you," Nancy said flatly, realization dawning at last. "Why did you follow us? Joker told you to stay at library tonight, just in case the I-Jin started looking for you."

"Yeah, but you know me: Joe the Dummy," Joe laughed, forehead beginning to gleam with perspiration.

"And how," Nancy murmured. "But I guess I'd better let Joker know where you went. He might be worried."

"No, don't do that!" Joe yelped as she pulled a cell phone from her pocket and punched in the number.

"Joker," she greeted a moment later. "It's Miss Deep. We just ran into Joe, if you've been wondering where he went."

She was greeted by a long silence on the other end. Then…

"That isn't possible, Miss Deep," Joker said flatly. "Joe is in front of me right now, trying to ply me with that damnably good coffee of his so that I'll be distracted when he makes his next inappropriate advances on my secretary!"

Nancy flinched, and a few customers looked up as this tirade ended in an angry bark easily audible through the tiny speaker in the phone.

"Well, then we're dealing with more than one Joe," she said with a shrug, "because we've got one here, trying to sneak out of here with the clerk's coffee cup."

"More than one Joe!" Joker exclaimed, prompting a dismayed whimper, decidedly high and feminine in register. "Calm down, Wendy; I'm sure there's just been a misunderstanding," he said, voice growing distant to Nancy's ears as he presumably pulled the phone away.

"Joker, lay off the coffee," she said flatly. "Seriously. It's doing bad, bad things to you."

"Why, what do you mean?"

Nancy moved the phone away and counted slowly to ten in an effort to calm down and keep her temper.

"Miss Deep?" Joker called, puzzled by this silence.

"I'm here," she said. "Now, remember who we're dealing with. Joe is a _clone_ of the greatest coffee guy in history, right?"  
  
"Yes," Joker replied slowly.

"Now, if they made one _clone_ of Joe, it's safe to assume that they could make another one, right?"

"Yes," he said again, and then sighed impatiently. "Exactly where are you going with this?"

"They've sent out another Joe!"

"Still on that other Joe, are you?" Joker said in a tone that indicated that he was shaking his head in despair at the over-abundant imagination of his agents.

"Don't even joke about things like that, Miss Makuhari!" the same feminine voice as before called in the background, sounding almost teary.

"Tell Wendy," Nancy began through gritted teeth, "that we're past the point of a joke. The other Joe is right here in front of me, reading '101 Favourite Tips For a Better Cup of Joe'."

"He's reading a book about the best way to put himself into a cup?" Yomiko asked, wrinkling her nose as she turned to Nancy. "He's even weirder than I thought!"

"That was Yomiko, then?" Joker asked wearily.

"Yes."

A pause.

"You girls are in a bookstore, aren't you?"

"Yes," Nancy replied again, not entirely liking the amused tone in his voice.

"The first one you've visited?"

"No."

Another pause.

"I told you so," Joker said mildly.

"Oh, shut up," she muttered. "What do we do about the second Joe?"

"Why don't you bring him back here for Wendy, since she clearly likes the first one so much?" Joker suggested with a vague hint of resentment in his tone.

Nancy blinked, startled, as this suggestion was met with an outraged squeak and the slam of a door in the background on the other end of the line.

"But seriously. What do we do with him?" she asked briskly.

"Oh, try to bring him back here, I suppose," Joker sighed. "Perhaps he can tell us exactly what the I-Jin are up to."

"Uh…and the other eighteen lined up outside the bookstore?" Nancy asked slowly, eyes trained on a bizarre spectacle.

There were, indeed, several more copies of the same young man peering through he window of the bookstore.

"Eighteen!" Joker repeated, horrified. "Eighteen Joes to deal with!"

"Yeah," Nancy confirmed grimly. "Do you think we've found this assassin team?"

"They sent Joe after Joe," Joker said thoughtfully. "Rather clever, if a little risky."

"Uh…how?" Nancy asked flatly.

"Well, there are any number of things that could go wrong," Joker replied.

"That's…not what I meant," Nancy admitted.

"Ah. Very well. Either way, Miss Deep, you and Agent Paper try to detain as many of the Joes as you can, and I'll be down there as soon as possible with our Joe."

"Hey, hold on!" Nancy began as the phone disconnected. "You…don't know where we are," she finished with a sigh. "Yomiko? I think we have a problem here."

"Yeah," Yomiko agreed, edging nervously away from the window. "There are a bunch of guys who look just like Mr. Joe, staring at us!"

"There's a bigger problem," Nancy informed her. "Joker's an idiot."

Yomiko blinked.

"I thought you meant something _new_," she said.

"We're supposed to capture as many of these Joes as possible for when Joker gets here, but he hung up before I could tell him where we were," Nancy continued, shaking her head.

Yomiko blinked again.

"Oh. That's why?"

"That's why what?"

"Why Mr. Joker's a…not-so-smart person sometimes?"

"Yeah; why? What were you thinking?"

"Well…just this and that, you know."

Nancy nodded emphatically.

"I know. I mean, does the guy even know the meaning of the phrase 'tidy up'?"

Yomiko looked a little sheepish, an image of her own apartment popping into her head within the thought bubble that popped up an instant before it.

"Uh, right."

"And that hair thing? It's one thing to see a girl smoothing her hair down all the time, but a guy?"

At this, Yomiko nodded in full agreement. She had never understood that, herself.

"And how about…hmm. I guess that's it," Nancy admitted. Well, let's go after the Joes before they all wander off for coffee."

"Okay," Yomiko agreed enthusiastically, withdrawing a stack of cue cards.

Nancy surreptitiously drew her weapon, and the two left the store, Yomiko stopping to bid her intended purchases a sad farewell.

"I'll try to come back for you, okay, guys?" she called as Nancy took her arm and steered her toward the door and away from another bookshelf.

-----------------------------------------------------

"Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo," Drake hummed to himself as he wandered down the streets of London, hands shoved into his pockets.

He sighed.

"I don't believe it. I'm bored. Without having that idiot girl and that idiot coffee guy to look after, I'm bored."

He sighed again.

"Welcome to 'Drake's Down-Time.' Yeah. Whoo."

-----------------------------------------------------

"Nancy," Yomiko called breathlessly several minutes later from atop a pile of fifteen Joes neatly bound together by several strips of iron-strong paper, "when did you say Mr. Joker would be here to collect them?"

Nancy stopped dead in the act of reaching through one of the remaining three Joes to steal his car keys and bus pass to ensure that he had nowhere to run.

"Damn it," she muttered, whipping out her cell phone.

---------------------------------------------------------

"Um…Mr. Joker?" Joe ventured timidly from the other side of the back seat of the vehicle currently speeding merrily down the street.

"What is it, Joe?" Joker asked absently, looking up briefly from the files that seemed to accompany him everywhere.

Joe opened his mouth to answer, but was cut off as a frightened shriek drifted from the front seat, and the next moment, the car swerved wildly to the left.

"Wendy, do try to be more careful!" Joker expostulated.

"I'm sorry," she called from behind the steering wheel. "I'm just not very good with a car."

"Well, you ought to learn," he said firmly. "I have a feeling you'll be doing a lot more driving sometime in the near future. And at any rate, you're not doing so badly. You just have to control the urge to run away – or steer away, rather – whenever another vehicle comes anywhere near you."

"Yeah," Joe agreed. "You're way too timid."

"Oh, and I suppose you're an expert on driving, as well as coffee and tea?" she flashed back, turning around and glaring at Joe as viciously as she could.

Both men noted, with expressions of horror frozen on their faces, that this took her attention off the road, and meant that the car was hurtling recklessly forward, unmanned. Or unwomanned, if one was so insistent on equal opportunity.

"Wendy…road," Joker said in something remarkably close to a whimper.

She turned around just in time to give another horrified exclamation and slam on the brakes, and at the same time, lean on the horn.

"You crazy idiot!" she shouted out the window at the car in front of her. "There's no one stopped in front of you for miles! What the hell are you doing?!"

"Actually, we've just reached a red light," Joker pointed out, quite able to be calmly amused now that his life wasn't in immediate danger. "And there are several people stopped in front of our new friend."

"Well, the light's green now! They should be going!" Wendy retorted.

"Hey, that…that's good," Joe said with a nervous laugh. "You're getting over the timidity."

"Right," she grumbled, punching the gas and sending the car into motion with such abruptness that Joe could have sworn that, for a split second, he and the car seat had become one entity. "I'll show you timid, you beverage-usurping bastard…"

"Y'know, a little timidity isn't always a bad thing," Joe informed her, thus earning Joker's combined respect and pity as a pair of big blue eyes caught the coffee guy's in the rear-view mirror and glared so icily that the temperature within the vehicle dropped by at least fifteen degrees. Celsius, naturally.

The vehicle sped up, swerving around several others, cutting off one or two, and Joker was about to comment on this in annoyance, when a soft, repeated beeping from his suit jacket caught his attention. He pulled out his phone.

"Yes, hello?"

"It's Miss Deep," the voice at the other end said coolly. "We've been wondering if you were going to call back. You hung up before I could tell you where we are."

"Oh, my. Now that I think about it, I did," Joker admitted sheepishly. "Although, surprisingly, Wendy doesn't seem to have noticed yet."

"That's because she's too busy drag racing some kid in a 'Vette!" Joe informed him.

"Wendy's drag-racing a guy in a Corvette?" Nancy asked in a tone that implied a raised eyebrow.

Joker peered out the window at the old, rather ugly vehicle struggling to keep pace with his own Lexus, by now likely depreciated several thousand in value, thanks to the rough treatment it was receiving from his secretary.

"No, Miss Deep, that's a Chevette."

"Oh," she said simply.

"We've won, by the way."

"You must be very proud."

"Thrilled."

"So…do you want to know where we are? Waiting patiently for you? With eighteen Joes in our possession?"

"That must be an interesting sight," Joker noted, nearly losing his grip on his phone as the car took a corner so tightly that it rocked, for a split second, onto two wheels. "Wendy, for goodness' sake, will you _be careful_?!"

"Is everything okay there?" Nancy asked hesitantly at this shout.

"Yes, just fine," he sighed. "Only, Wendy seems to have gone a little road rage. An attempt to prove something to Joe, I believe."

"It is not!" the blonde protested vehemently, immediately slowing down to a speed approaching the posted limits and deciding upon a lane once and for all.

"Still, a little psychology goes a long way," Joker said smugly.

An exasperated sigh emanated from the phone.

"Look, do you want to know where we are, or would you rather just keep driving around until you coincidentally find us? Somewhere in London?"

"Very well," Joker agreed. "So, where are you, then?"

"Mr. Joker!" Wendy called.

"One moment, Wendy," he said, holding up a hand.

"Uh, Mr. Joker, you should probably look at this," Joe told him, squinting out the window as the vehicle rolled to a stop.

"In a moment," Joker repeated impatiently.

Wendy made an exasperated noise.

"Mr. Joker, there's a man in a tuxedo and an opera cape and a mask, singing – with a surprising amount of echo – about how he will bring death to the treacherous coffee guy, Joe, as well as those who interfered with the beautiful love between him and his darling Christine!"

Joker was silent for a moment, digesting this.

"Miss Deep, I think we've run into an I-Jin. I'll need you and Agent Paper here as soon as possible."

With that, ignoring the protests from the woman on the other end, he pressed a button and tucked the phone back into his jacket.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Nancy put her phone away, grumbling about everything in the universe, and a few things twice, as she did so.

"That's just fantastic," she muttered under the curious and watchful gazes of Yomiko and a heaping pile of Joe.

"What is it, Nancy?" Yomiko asked, concern clear in her eyes. "You sounded just like Drake for a minute."

"And it gets better," Nancy groaned, shuddering at the thought.

"So, what's wrong?" Yomiko prompted gently, climbing off the pile of Joes and approaching her partner.

"Joker and Joe – and Wendy, who seems to have been a little too inspired by Vin Diesel's fine work in The Fast and the Furious­ – just ran into what they believe to be an I-Jin. Joker has instructed that we get there immediately, but of course the idiot neglected to tell us where exactly that is."

Yomiko blinked for a moment, startled, and then brightened.

"Oh, he probably just wanted us to track him through his phone!"

Now it was Nancy's turn to blink, startled.

"Uh…we can track him through his phone?"

"Yeah!" Yomiko replied. "You didn't know that?"

Nancy counted slowly to ten, and then turned back to Yomiko.

"Well, no one was exactly in a tearing hurry to _tell_ me," she pointed out.

"Sorry," Yomiko said sheepishly. "I guess I thought you knew."

"Don't worry about it," Nancy said briskly. "Let's just go."

Yomiko nodded enthusiastically.

"Right!"

And with that, the two girls took off from the street corner just outside the bookstore that they had been browsing, under the bewildered eyes of several onlookers.

The bewildered onlookers became even more bewildered when…

Joe #12 turned to Joe #5 as best he could, given their present situation, which was basically his foot being in his fellow Joe's ear, and the both of them sandwiched between Joes #3 and #4, Joes #6 through #11, and Joes #13 through #18.

"Hey, they're gonna come back to untie us, aren't they?"

------------------------------------------------- 

End Notes: Eheh…okay, I decided: the Phantom of the Opera is going to have a bit more of a role than I had anticipated. It's just too silly _not_ to do! And I don't know why I'm developing a bit of a fascination with Nancy being the only one of the lot with a brain, but I guess it kind of works on some level. And it's only until Drake comes back and completely takes over the next chapter to make up, in my fangirlish little mind, for having very little of him in this chapter. :o)


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

-------------------------------------------

It hadn't been his lucky day.

To be sure, if one asked Mr. Drake Anderson on any given day how that 'luck' thing was working out for him, they might have received much the same answer.

Still, as far as severely bad luck went, this day was shaping up to take the proverbial cake. The proverb of the cake had always been one of Drake's favourites, although it always left him oddly hungry…

It wasn't bad enough that he had flown to London in a tearing hurry at Joker's request, been paired up with Agent Paper – and worse, a commonly known traitor, which no one else seemed to care about – to protect some coffee-making idiot.

Or that now he had an intense craving for a cup of coffee.

Or that his hands were still shaking from his ten cups of earlier that day.

It wasn't even bad enough that, once he had arrived in London and rushed to the Library, they had proceeded to sit around, drinking coffee, and watching the stupidest bit of drama to exist in recent years, unfolding between that same coffee-making idiot, and Joker, and Joker's secretary until finally, he, Drake, had taken the initiative to point out that they could just as easily wait for the I-Jin to make their move_ outside_ of Joker's office.

Thus far, the highlight of his day had been wandering the streets aimlessly, humming "The Streets of London", and looking for something nice for his kid.

Naturally, being the highlight, it hadn't lasted.

No sooner had he finished humming the first verse, when he wheeled about abruptly at the sound of a wildly maniacal – and remarkably echoey – laugh.

"What the hell is this?" he demanded in something close to a whine as his eyes lit on the tall, thin man, face covered by a white half-mask and the rest of him covered by obscenely dressy and pretentious opera clothes and a billowy cape.

Even more curious was the crowd of women, old, young, and otherwise, surrounding the man and watching in shiny-eyed adoration as he ranted – in a pretty nice voice, Drake had to admit – about various nonsensical things.

The gruff pottery-dude drew near, intending to ask one of the fascinated young women what was going on, when the sound of a car horn from several feet away, at the other end of the conveniently-placed vacant lot, caught his attention.

"Drake!" a familiar voice called from the back-right-side window of the Lexus.

"Yeah, hi," Drake called back amid a lot of grumbling as he made his way over. "So, what the hell's going on? I-Jin?"

"We believe so," Joker replied grimly before frowning slightly. "Although, what purpose this man is to serve, I cannot say. I have contacted Agent Paper and Miss Deep, and they should be here any—"

"Mr. Joker!" Joe interjected frantically.

Drake and Joker both glanced absently in his direction…

…and then stared in bewilderment and consternation at the curious sight of Joe attempting (unsuccessfully) to tackle Wendy to the gravel that covered the ground, and keep her there.

Nothing daunted by the weight of a scrawny young man pressing her facedown into a bed of pebbles, she was trying (with marginally more success) to squirm away and crawl toward the crown of women surrounding the masked man.

Joker bristled.

"Joe, if you can't restrain yourself in public, I shudder to consider the sort of injuries you're going to sustain by the end of Friday evening. She isn't as easygoing as she seems, you know."

"Must…flock…adoringly...around…man…with…pretty…voice," Wendy added helpfully, staring ahead as though in a trance and trying absently to kick Joe away.

"She's doing it again," Joe explained.

"Why me?" Drake muttered, reflecting that he should simply have a tee-shirt made with this slogan, as he spent more time in the average day asking it than not.

The urge to ask the unanswerable out of his system, Drake stalked over to the pair sprawled out on the ground, picked them up one at a time, tucked each under one arm, and stalked back to the car.

"Lock the door," he suggested, glancing over his shoulder at Joker as he slammed the passenger door shut behind him.

"Er…you and Joe are next to the locks," Joker pointed out rather vaguely as Wendy tried to climb over his lap to get to the door closest to the masked man.

"Must…hear…angel…singing…"

"Right," Drake grumbled, flipping the power lock. Then he turned to glare at the blond girl pouting pointedly at him. "What the hell are you doing, anyway?"

"Did you notice the rest of the crowd?" Joker asked, sweeping an agitated hand over his hair as Wendy tried to chew through the door handle. "Don't make me belt you in," he said warningly.

"Yeah; a bunch of women," Drake shrugged, and then stared incredulously at Joker as something sunk in. "Don't tell me this guy can hypnotize women with his voice!"

"He _is_ modelled after The Phantom of the Opera," Joker explained.

Drake smirked.

"Well, they say that only the weak-minded can be hypnotized."

"Which quite explains why women succumb to it," Joker finished.

The two enjoyed a lengthy chuckle at this, which was cut abruptly short as three hundred women turned from the masked man long enough to hurl three hundred purses at the vehicle, at great velocity.

"Look, I'll take the guy on before someone gets hurt," Drake said briskly.

"I'll come help!" a voice piped up.

Three men turned to glare at Wendy.

"No, you won't," Drake snapped. "Tie her down or something, would you, Joker? And Joe, quit bleeding on the upholstery!"

"Sorry," Joe said sheepishly, clamping a hand over his gushing nose.

"Oh, and Drake?" Joker called, looking up from his task of thoroughly entangling Wendy in the safety belts as Drake started from the car.

"Yeah?"

"While I don't feel especially inclined to at the moment either, see if you can capture this man alive. He might prove useful."

"Right," Drake grumbled, bidding a sad farewell to his delightful images of venting his full aggravation on this caped fruit.

"Hey! Show-tune boy!" he barked as he drew nearer the man and began elbowing his way through the crowd of utterly unheeding women.

The man fell silent mid-rant and scrutinized Drake carefully.

"And who might you be, monsieur?"

"La Drake," he replied flatly. "Erik, wasn't it? The Phantom of the Opera?"

"Oh, you know of me, monsieur!"

"Yeah, I know of you," Drake grumbled. "I also know of how hard I'll punch you if you call me 'monsieur' again."

"I do not believe you should find me such an easy target as you expect," Erik chuckled. "Monsieur."

"Gragh!" Drake grunted incoherently, throwing himself forward at Erik, who stepped fluidly aside.

However, he didn't step quite 'aside' enough, and thus Drake caught his left arm by one shoulder and lifted him neatly into the air.

Unfortunately for Mister Drake, as this was the first time this maneuver had ever worked, he had no idea where to go from here, and so, after thirty seconds of awkwardly holding Erik up in the air, he set him down, feeling bitterly that this made a very lame ending to a very cool move.

To vent his frustration, he grabbed the other man's collar and delivered several punches to the side of his head.

"Oh, no!" three hundred horrified women squealed together. "Our poor Erik!"

"Do not worry about me, my angels of music," Erik called rather less smoothly than he might have, had he not being jolted around by the fist repeatedly knocking against his ear.

"Oh, brother," Drake muttered, his faint nausea at all the shiny-eyes causing him to abandon his tight hold on Erik's collar.

"Ah! You abandon caution, monsieur," Erik proclaimed as he twisted away, "and that shall be your downfall!"

Drake saw red. Not just the red satin lining of the Phantom's cape. A bright, angry, shimmering red that clouded vision and sanity.

"Don't. Call. Me. Monsieur," he ground out, charging the other man again.

His shoulder once again connected, and the two fell to the ground heavily, where a grapple occurred as each tried to get a firm hold on the other's throat.

"Don't hurt our Erik!" one girl wailed.

"Like Hell!" Drake grunted, trying to twist out of the Phantom's surprisingly strong grip and delivering a few more solid punches to the man's stomach.

The surprise of our unlucky hero must only be imagined when a pair of hands, clearly not Erik's, closed over the back of his shirt and dragged him from the ground.

"Don't. Hurt. Our. Erik," a vaguely familiar voice said, trying for menace, but achieving only overwhelming cuteness that Drake, in his agitated state, did not notice.

"Agent Paper," he sighed. "It got you, too, huh?"

"Man's…voice…so…pretty," Yomiko sighed happily, releasing Drake and skipping over to join the crowd of women surrounding Erik, who had dusted himself off and began to rant, this time about boorish American men who looked down on those smarter and more cultured than themselves.

"Yomiko!" another feminine voice, this one slightly deeper, called frantically. "Come back! I have a book for you!"

"Oh, it's you," Drake noted flatly as Nancy slowed to a stop at his side. "Why the Hell didn't that caped freak hypnotize you?"

"My theory is that it has something to do with my being an I-Jin like him," Nancy replied absently, trying vainly to attract Yomiko's attention by pretending to read and immensely enjoy the book in her hand. "Of course, it could have something to do with the fact that my being here at all breaks all laws of logic and continuity, thus creating a force field of bad writing that somehow protects me from his mind control. Either that, or I just have taste in men."

"Miss Deep! Agent Paper! Have you reached the site of the I-Jin attack yet?" Joker's voice came through Nancy's earphone.

Nancy sighed, putting a hand to her forehead.

"You're parked twenty feet away, Joker. I can see you from here. Joe's grinning and waving at us right now."

"Oh, so he is," Joker chuckled, before shifting back into business-like cool. "What is the situation?"

"I-Jin? Young women flocked around him?" Nancy said, slightly annoyed. "You've been watching this longer than we have."

"Er, right. However, perhaps you could clear this up for me: why is Yomiko staring up at our Phantom with shiny-eyes?"

"He's hypnotized her, too," Nancy explained through gritted teeth, glaring daggers at the caped man.

"No fair! Why does Yomiko get to flock adoringly to the Angel of Music, and I don't?" a female voice demanded plaintively in the background.

"Oh, hush, Wendy," Joker grumbled. "And stop wriggling like that. I'm not going to untie you, and you're making Joe's nose bleed all over the place."

"I don't want to know," Nancy sighed. "Look, do you want us to take him alive, or can I kill him?"

"Hey, hey, hey, if I don't get to kill him, you sure as Hell can't," Drake broke in, miffed.

"Right," Nancy said flatly. "So, take him alive."

"Please," Joker said.

"Well, then. We'll just go do that. And you just keep watching from the safety and comfort of your car."

"This hasn't been your lucky day, either," Drake noted, shaking his head in perfect understanding as Nancy pointedly switched off the communicator and started toward the crowd.

"Don't get me started," Nancy grumbled.

"Monsieur, Mademoiselle," a voice called mistily from behind a lamp post.

Drake tensed immediately at the hated address, but Nancy put up a barring arm before he could attack, and both watched as a young woman stepped out into plain view.

"Who the Hell are you?" Drake asked bluntly.

"Who am I, Monsieur? I am called Cindy."

"Great, Cindy," Nancy said flatly. "Now, how about talking normally? I think this guy might snap if you call him 'Monsieur' again."

"Okay, fine," Cindy huffed, pouting slightly.

"Hold on," Nancy said, frowning. "I've seen you before."

Cindy blinked, then gazed searchingly at Nancy.

"Yeah, I guess I've seen you, too, now that I look at my predecessor's memories a little more carefully."

"Uh…predecessor?"

"Yeah," Cindy said sadly. "Mr. Ikkyu killed the whole scientist team when we got side-tracked talking about why King Arthur and Dracula would be bad choices for an assassin team."

"Aside from the fact that they don't exist," Drake said dryly.

Cindy grinned deviously.

"Ah! But as you see, that has not stopped me in the case of my darling Erik! I have, through immense cleverness, managed to create the perfect likeness of the most perfect man ever to be conceived by an author!"

"Oh, that's where I know you from," Nancy said, nodding thoughtfully. "You were the scientist who would always wander around singing show-tunes."

"Yeah," Cindy agreed sadly. "Truly, my calling was a life in musical theatre!"

"But you nobly gave it up to work as a scientist for an evil organization," Drake finished flatly.

"Who among us does not have a childhood dream unrealized?" Cindy asked, making dramatic arm gestures.

"Uh, yeah; that's great," Drake said, ducking just in time to avoid being hit by one flailing arm. "Now, why did you call us?"

"I have realized," Cindy began, obviously finding that melodrama suited her, "that there are some things best not tampered with. It seems that a man so perfect as my Phantom was never meant to exist. Perhaps it is best that he be defeated. And so, I will aid you in defeating him."

"Seemed pretty easy before," Drake shrugged.

"That's because you weren't playing fair!" Cindy shot back, glaring at him. "Nevertheless, there are a few things that you must take into consideration when doing battle with Erik. The first thing to remember is, 'your hand at the level of your eyes!'"

Nancy and Drake exchanged uneasy looks.

"Uh…and that means?" Nancy prompted.

"The Punjab Lasso," Cindy explained. "If you assume the position I have described, you may ward it off and keep yourself safe."

"Great. Thanks," Drake said flatly. "If that's all…"

"Just…try not to hurt him too much," Cindy implored, eyes growing teary. "I worked so hard on him!"

"That's a mental image that I frankly didn't want," Drake sighed, shaking his head.

"It must be nice to have the capability to make your perfect man, though," Nancy admitted with a shrug as the two began to push through the crowd of women.

"If I was gonna make the perfect man," Drake began before trailing off and glaring at Nancy, who was biting back a snicker. "Shut up. Seriously, you'd think she wouldn't have given her perfect man the ability to attract any other woman in the world."

"Cindy was never too bright," Nancy told him, her expression half-irritated and half-fondly-nostalgic. "Look, I'm going to go find Yomiko. I'll try to snap her out of his trance, and we'll be back to help you as soon as we can."

"Sure," Drake called as she began to push back through the crowd at a slightly different point, toward the pretty bespectacled dark-haired girl watching the Phantom adoringly about halfway from the back. "I think I can handle a musician."

"Ah! You return, Monsieur!" an aggravatingly familiar, aggravatingly pretty masculine voice proclaimed, cackling, as they pushed their way to the front of the crowd.

Drake balled his hands tightly into fists and uttered a severely annoyed growl.

"This really isn't my lucky day."

-----------------------------------------------------------------

End Notes: Oy. I think this chapter began to fall apart a little. It was fun to me, but I doubt anyone else'll like it much. Too much Wendy/Joker 'shippiness, too much Phantom of the Opera. Less ass-kickin'-Drake-action than I had hoped. Still, there's always next chapter. :o)

And if you did like this chapter, feel perfectly free to let me know. Or if you didn't. Tell me in detail exactly what you didn't like about it. I likes reviews. :o)


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

* * *

She was floating in a lovely, warm, soothing ocean of sound, carried to Paradise amongst the orange-and-violet-tipped clouds. Verily, she could happily stay here forever, simply listening to the voice of the Angel that had become her lifeline.

Still, she had to say, this would be a lot better if she had a book.

Yomiko pouted briefly, and then immediately forgot what the problem had been as the man in the cape began to sing. She stared adoringly, hands clasped and eyes shiny, as his magnificent voice thrilled through her.

Then, suddenly, the world went silent.

Yomiko frowned. This was fairly unusual. One would think that, if all sound somehow vanished from the world, there should at least be a clear reason for it.

The reason was obviously not that everything that had been previously making noise had suddenly ceased to do so; a quick glance up at the caped man who, Yomiko noticed for the first time, was a little overdressed for a random parking-lot concert, showed that he was still singing.

The crowd all still seemed, judging from their moving mouths, to be murmuring excitedly to one another.

Drake still seemed to be grumbling in annoyance as he waited for the masked man to finish his song so they could finish what had looked like a fairly hostile discussion.

Just as she was about to alleviate the sudden boredom of having entirely forgotten what had been so fascinating to her just a minute ago and pull her emergency back-up book out from beneath her skirt, where it was tucked into the holster around her thigh, a pair of slim hands caught her by the shoulders and whirled her around.

"Nancy!" she exclaimed happily, and then frowned.

She had heard that, if a little more dimly than she had thought she'd said it.

However, when Nancy began to say something to her, she heard not a thing.

Yomiko shrugged helplessly.

"I can't hear you, Nancy!"

With an exasperated sigh, Nancy whipped out a pad of paper and a pen and scribbled something quickly.

"'Of course you can't hear anything,'" Yomiko read slowly. "'I put earplugs in your ears to break the Phantom's spell.' Oh! I guess that explains a few things, actually."

"Glad to help. We should probably—" Here, Nancy stopped and sighed again as Yomiko blinked at her in adorable confusion.

Another scribbling of pen on paper later, Yomiko's expression brightened, and she began to reply, which Nancy cut short by seizing her arm and hauling her away.

* * *

"Hello, Agent Paper, Miss Deep," Joker greeted all of three minutes later as the two women climbed into the car, Yomiko into the back seat and Nancy into the driver's seat.

"Um…what?" Yomiko asked, rather loudly.

Shooting Joker a long-suffering look over her shoulder, Nancy scribbled something down onto a pad of paper and passed it back to Yomiko.

"'Never mind,'" Yomiko read slowly. "Oh. Okay!"

"Er…I almost hesitate to ask," Joker began as the bespectacled girl pulled out her emergency back-up book and was two seconds later lost to the world. "But I feel that I really must nevertheless. Why exactly is Yomiko unable to hear anything?"

"Because of the earplugs," Nancy replied calmly.

Joker nodded thoughtfully.

"Ah. Because of the earplugs. Of course."

"Yeah," Nancy said dryly. "And now that we have that figured out, can I ask something?"

"Of course," Joker replied.  
  
"Great. Why do you have Wendy tied up back there?"

Joker sighed, rubbing his eyes wearily.

"To bring an end to her attempts at chewing through the door handle and joining the adoring crowd surrounding our Phantom."

"And don't think I don't resent that, when Yomiko was allowed to," Wendy pouted.

"Okay," Nancy said thoughtfully. "To keep her still. That makes sense. But I don't see why you had to half-unbutton her shirt and push her skirt way up to do it."

"I'm only human," he replied flatly, crossing his arms and nearly pouting. "But don't tell anyone; I don't particularly want that getting out."

"Uh…sure."

"And anyway," Joe, who had been remarkably silent hitherto, added from the passenger's seat. "There were fanservice quotas to think about."

"Exactly," Joker agreed. "And so, unless you or Yomiko cares to get out of the car and dance around provocatively in skimpy clothing, we'll have to keep her like this."

"No, thanks," Nancy said flatly, before staring oddly at Joe. "You know your nose is gushing blood, right?"

"Uh-huh," Joe replied faintly, watching her in awe, one hand clamped over his nose.

"Men," Nancy grumbled.

"I'll thank you to not lump _all_ men into a category with Joe," Joker said, clearly miffed. "Some of us do have IQs higher than that of a coffee bean, after all."

"Yeah; I'll let you know when I find one," Nancy sighed, rubbing her forehead before looking up again. "So, should we check on Drake at any point?"

"If Yomiko promises to stay here to avoid being hypnotized again, you may go assist Drake in the defeat of the Phantom now," Joker replied.

Nancy smirked.

"Lucky me. He'd better have saved me a piece."

"Um…what did you decide?" Yomiko asked slightly more loudly than usual, thanks once again to the earplugs.

"I'm going to…right," Nancy finished with a sigh, whipping out the pad of paper and pen once again.

A moment of scribbling later, she passed a single sheet back to Yomiko, who read it, eyes growing gradually wider with alarm as she did so.

"But Nancy, you can't go by yourself!"

"Drake will be with her, Agent Paper," Joker reminded her, even as he forgot one or two things about the current situation. "She's going to assist him, after all."

Biting back a grumble, Nancy jotted down a brief summary of Joker's words and passed the sheet back to Yomiko, who, upon reading it, shook her head firmly.

"I still want to go with her. I'll keep the earplugs in so I won't be hypnotized again, but I can't let Nancy and Drake fight without me."

"It's simply not practical," Joker said, drawing another confused look from Yomiko and another annoyed sound from Nancy, who went to work transcribing. "You won't be able to hear anything going on around you, and that seems a dangerous way to fight."

"Yeah," Joe added helpfully. "So you'd be totally unprepared when the end boss showed up, because you wouldn't be able to hear his theme music!"

Yomiko frowned, head tilted to one side.

"What did Mr. Joe say?" she asked Wendy, who was at that moment trying to figure out the best way to untie a well-knotted seatbelt without the use of her hands.

"I don't think you want – oh, right," Wendy finished with a sigh.

Nancy shoved a slip of paper at Yomiko.

"'Joe was just being Joe; you know what that means,'" Yomiko read slowly. "Oh! He just said a…not-so-smart thing, then!"

"Well, more like something utterly irrelevant and completely nonsensical, but why nitpick?"

"Mr. Joker!" Joe protested. "Some of what I say is relevant!"

"Yes, Joe, I'm sure that someday you will say something relevant," Joker agreed tiredly. "I only hope I'm around to see it happen."

"I think I just saw Drake fly back into a fence," Nancy noted curiously. "Think this would be a good time to go help him?"

"I'll come with!"

Nancy, Joker, and Wendy stared in surprise and slight consternation at Joe, who was at that moment looking about the group expectantly, waiting to see how his Very Good Idea would be taken. Yomiko simply stared in slightly annoyed confusion at Joe, wondering if maybe she had found the downside of wearing earplugs.

"Uh, you?" Nancy repeated slowly.

"Yeah!" Joe replied eagerly. "Think about it! I was made by the same people he was!"

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean you aren't a weakling," Nancy pointed out. "You'd probably be obliterated."

"I think sending Joe would be a wonderful idea," Wendy said both hopefully and helpfully.

Joe's eyes grew shiny.  
  
"Well, I gotta go, now that my girl's counting on me!"

"I might save the I-jin the trouble of killing him and do it myself if he calls me 'his girl' one more time," Wendy muttered, trying and failing miserably to cross her arms. "Stupid seatbelts…"

Joker looked mildly alarmed. He leaned over.

"Too much evil too soon, Wendy," he murmured. "It's supposed to be a process, remember."

"Evil has nothing to do with it! We're talking about self-respect here!" she protested.

"Well? Shall we go kick some Phantom ass?" Joe asked beamingly of a very dismayed and vaguely annoyed Nancy.

"There's really nothing I can do to talk you out of this, is there?" she sighed. "Fine. But Joker, you'd better not blame me if he gets himself killed."

"If anything happens to Joe, Miss Deep, we shall regard it as the tragic accident that it is, and refrain from blaming you or anyone else."

"Be careful, Miss Makuhari!" Wendy called as the two climbed out of the car.

Then, sensing that she was being watched expectantly, she continued grudgingly.

"You be careful, too, Joe."

"Don't worry, babe," Joe said with a wink. "Nothing's gonna mess up Friday night, not even my untimely death!"

"Oh, wonderful," she said as Joe skipped across the empty lot towards the crowd of women, followed by a much less enthusiastic Nancy. "I very well might be spending Friday night with a coffee-making ghost."

"At least if he's dead, he can't touch you in any ways that might have otherwise earned him sudden death," Joker said, glaring after the young man, who was still flamboyantly blowing kisses back in the direction of the car.

"Um…Mr. Joker?" Yomiko piped up hesitantly. "Can I take out these earplugs yet? I keep getting the feeling I'm missing something important."

Joker and Wendy exchanged glances. Joker reached into his jacket and withdrew a pad of paper and a pen, scrawled something quickly, and passed it to Yomiko.

"'Don't worry,'" she read. "'You can't miss what doesn't exist.' What?! That doesn't even make sense!"

* * *

"Hey, Drake," Nancy greeted as she jogged over to the very angry man pulling himself from the ground and dusting flecks of green paint that had previously been decorating a fence, from his back and shoulders. "What happened to you?"

"He had his army of fan-girls attack," the blond man said flatly.

"So, I guess it's not your lucky day?" Joe asked with a hearty laugh at his own cleverness, coming to a halt behind her.

Drake glared, first at the Phantom in the center of his crowd of women, and then at Joe.

"Shut up."

Then he turned to address Nancy.

"Why is he here?"

Nancy hesitated.

"He's…going to help us with the Phantom."

Drake simply stared. Finally…

"Right. So, Joker's finally completely snapped under the stress of constant overwork, huh?"

"No, Joe came on his own. He got the idea that it would impress a girl."

"She said she believed in me," Joe sighed dreamily, his brain busily rewriting reality to better suit his fancy. "And she said that, if I came back to her, she'd reward me with a kiss!"

"Great," Drake grumbled. "If he gets killed, I'm not taking responsibility."

"I told Joker the same thing," Nancy assured him. "He understands. Although, there could be promotions and raises involved if we did take responsibility for Joe's death."

Drawing his weapon, Drake sighed.

"Well, let's get to it and hope for the best."

"Why is that starting to feel like our theme?" Nancy wondered briefly before starting after Drake.

* * *

"So, how did it go, you three?" Joker asked brightly as Drake and Nancy stormed back to the car, followed by an energetically skipping Joe. "I don't see a Phantom in your possession, and so I assume you either forgot to take him alive, or got overenthusiastic."

"No," Nancy said flatly as she slid into the front seat. "And no."

"Well, then, what on earth happened? Yomiko hasn't been wearing the earplugs for the last twenty-seven seconds, without ill effect, and Wendy has stopped begging to be let out of the car for a moment, and assuring me with nervously shifting eyes that she only wants to go for a walk."

"I only did want to go for a walk!" the blonde protested.

"Of course you did," Joker said, patting her comfortingly on the head.

"We didn't take him alive," Drake began through gritted teeth, "because just as we got to the front of the crowd, he belted out something about it being over now, the music of the night – and he drew the word "night" out for about four minutes – did a weird swishy thing with his cape, and disappeared into nothing."

"It was a little anticlimactic, really," Joe added, leaning casually against the side of the car.

"Ah," Joker said, quite uncertain as to what to make of all of this. "So…he has simply disappeared, then."

"Yeah," Drake agreed.

"Although, he left this behind," Nancy added, staring curiously down at the white half-mask in her hand.

"We'll take it back to have it analyzed," Joker said briskly, reaching for the scrap of cloth. "Not entirely sure what for, but that's what we do, and this is not the time to be scrapping tradition, now, is it? As for you three, Agent Paper, Miss Deep, Mister Drake, try to get some rest before the next round begins."

"Yeah; maybe they'll send the cast of _Cats_ after us next!" Joe suggested excitedly.

"If I catch any whiff of spandex, fake fur, or stage makeup, I'm going home," Drake announced flatly.

"Understandable, Drake, although it does disturb me that you knew immediately what Joe was referring to," Joker said, hiding a grin.

"I have a kid," Drake informed him in a tight, controlled voice. "She likes cats. And she likes _Cats_."

"Um…what?" Yomiko asked vaguely, looking up from her book. Then something seemed to dawn on her. "Oh…is this one of those things that it's easier not to ask about, Nancy?"

"Oh, yeah," Nancy replied. "So, do you want to go see if we still have a hotel room to go to by this point?"

"Okay!" Yomiko agreed cheerfully, then hesitated. "But…um…do you think we could go back to the bookstore where we left all the Joes? I left a few books there."

"You mean, you only bought out three quarters of the store's merchandise, and you want to go back to finish the job?" Drake asked with a smirk before taking his leave in the interest of not prolonging the conversation any further. "'Let me take you by the hand,'" he hummed as he sauntered from the rapidly emptying lot, "'and lead you through the streets of London; I'll show you something that'll make you change your mind…'"

"Hey, speaking of all the Joes," Nancy began thoughtfully, glancing over her shoulder at Joker, "weren't we supposed to do something with them?"

Joker pondered this carefully.

"Honestly, Miss Deep, I can't imagine what that could have been," he finally admitted.

Nancy turned to Wendy.

"Has he been drinking more coffee on the sly?"

"Er…not that I noticed. Although, I was busy driving. Honestly, there are some savages out there…"

Nancy raised one eyebrow.

"Uh, right. Has he just been _drinking_ on the sly?"

"I don't think so," Wendy replied carefully. "Although, that could explain all these seatbelts."

"I've explained the seatbelts," Joker reminded her a little indignantly. "It wasn't _entirely_ for fun. Er, it wasn't for fun at all, that is."

"Yomiko and I left eighteen clones of Joe tied up in front of a bookstore! You were on your way over to help us collect them, when you got distracted by this Phantom, who I have the uneasy feeling, is going to return at the most inconvenient moment possible. Now, would you like us to do anything with the Joes, or just let them continue to brighten up the street corner with their eighteen dazzling personalities?" Nancy demanded, losing patience with what seemed to be going the way of another bit of meaningless dialogue.

"Well, I think the best thing to do for now is let the I-jin come to us. Thus, I will be taking Joe back to the Library. Agent Paper, Miss Deep, feel free to head to your hotel, but stay in contact in case it should become necessary."

"But...we left eighteen Joes tied up on the street corner," Nancy reiterated, wondering if excessive consumption of coffee could do this kind of damage to a person's short-term memory, or if the bound and dishevelled blonde next to him was responsible for his somewhat hazy reasoning.

_But then again_, Nancy thought, _that doesn't explain why his reasoning is like it is the rest of the time. Unless those two make a habit of this sort of…ARGH! No, I don't want to think about it! He may tie her down to his desk for fun and games several times a day, but that doesn't mean I have to think about it! Out, damned mental image! It burns! It burns! AAAAARGH!_

"Um…Nancy?" Yomiko called hesitantly.

Nancy turned around and shot the other girl a tired smile.

"Yeah?"

"Are you okay? You look like you swallowed a bug or something: kind of green."

"Yeah, I'm fine. Look, let's get out of here before Joker changes his mind and sends us after the Joes right now."

"Well, okay. Good night, Mr. Joker. Bye, Joe. Um…do you want some help with those seat belts before we leave, Wendy?"

"That would be nice," the other girl replied, smiling up at Yomiko gratefully, before reflecting with a pained expression, "I can't feel my arms."

"You know, I think I know how Drake feels," Nancy noted curiously, a small part of her mind screaming in pain at this identification with the burly pottery dude.

* * *

"Uh…" Joe #4 began hesitantly. "You _did_ say they were gonna come back and untie us at some point, didn't you?"

Joe #12 sighed heavily as best he could, the drama and wistfulness somewhat spoiled due to having Joe #17's toe in his ear.

"Someday," he said, voice and eyes quivery. "Someday…"

* * *

End Notes: Whoa! And I thought nothing happened in the _last _chapter! This one takes the cake for pointlessness. I want some cake… [Pout] :o)


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

* * *

The hour was late, and the lights were dim.

Around the table were seated five men, four in brown vests, red ties, and arm cuffs, and one garbed in whatever it is that absurdly old men with mechanical contraptions on their heads, who are heartily sick and tired of this whole paltry "fashion" thing, like to wear.

The five men wore expressions of deepest concentration, their minds utterly enthralled by the matters of grave importance before them.

"King me," Mr. Gentleman requested smugly.

Alex and David exchanged uneasy looks, each frantically cudgelling his brains for any recollection at all of a "king me" move in the fine game of poker.

"Er, we aren't actually _playing_ checkers right now, sir," Alex finally said a little hesitantly.

Mr. Gentleman fixed him with a stern look.

"Listen, m'boy, I invented this game; I think I have some idea of how it's played."

Phil, who had been with the Library for a mere two weeks, leaned over and muttered to the man next to him,

"He invented checkers?"

"That's what he _says_," Frankie replied, very carefully under his breath. "But he also says he invented backgammon, Go Fish, air hockey, and the treble clef."

"Maybe we should stop trying to make him live any longer," Phil noted sadly. "I think he's starting to get senile."

Frankie looked alarmed.

"Don't let him hear you say that!"

Mr. Gentleman's hearing Phil's remarkably tactless comment, the sort that only someone with no experience around this place could possibly make, did not turn out to be an issue, however, as at that moment, he was rather engrossed in studying his cards carefully.

"I need two," David told Phil, who, as the newbie, had been automatically saddled with the role of dealer.

"One for me," Alex said, tossing one card into the center pile.

Frankie glanced down at his cards, and then up with a huge grin.

"I'm good," he said.

"Fold," Phil said automatically, tossing his hand down on the table.

"Fold," David agreed, doing likewise.

"Fold," Alex said, seeing no particular reason to break with an establishing tradition.

"Checkmate," Mr. Gentleman said.

"I suppose he invented chess, too?" Phil muttered.

This comment did not go unheard by Mr. Gentleman, who looked up immediately.

"No, young man, chess was invented through a very different means. I know a rather useful little song about it, if you would care to know the particulars."

"I'll look it up on the internet when I get home," Phil assured him hastily.

Frankie leaned over to Alex.

"Are you starting to wish we'd brought someone else in for a fifth for Guy's Poker Night? Like, maybe Susan or Marianne or someone? Or even Wendy, if Joker ever gives her an evening off?"

"Or that turtle," Alex added, gesturing to Mr. Gentleman's pet.

"Or even worse, that new coffee guy," Frankie said with a shudder. "Don't know if you've talked to him, but he's a dim one. Brews a damn good cup of coffee, though."

"Jumanji!" Mr. Gentleman called triumphantly.

"Ugh," the other four men said in unison.

Really, there was little more to say…

* * *

Meanwhile, in a hotel room located at that grand and inclusive area known as Somewhere Else, Yomiko was standing firmly in front of the door, arms stretched out to either side, fixing Nancy with a look that contained all the sternness she could muster.

Which, for the records, was not a terribly great amount.

"Okay, Nancy, this time I have the door blocked, and there are no cars in here, so you have to answer: how did you get out of that rocket?"

"Like I couldn't just go through the window, or through the floor. Or through you," Nancy murmured, her expression hovering somewhere between exasperated and affectionate.

"I wonder if that would make us legally married anywhere," Yomiko said reflectively, and then fell silent, pondering this.

When, after five minutes, she was still staring into space, cheeks slightly red, Nancy sighed and put a hand to her head, wondering where she had left her Advil and hoping her own blush wasn't noticeable.

"Weren't we talking about something?"

"Oh, right! So? Can't you just tell me how you got out and back here?"

"Sure, why not?" Nancy shrugged. "If you really have to know. The running gag is starting to get old, anyway, and I'm pretty sure I'll get into trouble if I steal another car. Now, I'm sure you remember enough of junior high science classes to know that what goes up must come down, right?"

"But…once you get into space, far enough from Earth's gravitational field, wouldn't you just start orbiting?" Yomiko asked, wondering if her junior high science teacher had gone over that while she was reading. Likely, considering that this described most of Yomiko's academic career.

"Not if the idiots in charge of setting up the launch were too stupid to give the rocket enough fuel to actually get away from that gravitational field."

Yomiko frowned slightly as she tried to work this out, and Nancy reflected with an inward smile that she could almost see the gears whirring merrily away, trying to connect fact with fact.

"Oh…" the smaller girl finally said, moving a few piles of books from a chair to the floor and sitting down.

"Yeah," Nancy agreed with a humourless smirk, dropping into the chair opposite, and then frowning, pulling a full set of encyclopaedias, procured on the way to the hotel, out of the cushions, and tossing them over her shoulder with a sigh.

Yomiko laughed sheepishly.

"I wondered where I'd left those…"

Biting back a less sheepish laugh, Nancy continued.

"Just in case you're wondering how much it hurts to plummet from the sky in a flaming rocket, the answer is 'a lot'. I fell so far through the earth, I ended up on the other side. Unfortunately, the other side of the earth was ocean. Thank God for Bubba the Friendly Whale."

"Wow…a whale took you back to land?"

"Actually, I just sort of…hitched a ride on my own," Nancy admitted. "Passed right through him. He didn't notice a thing. Although, I have a sneaking sympathy for Jonah now."

"And…Bubba took you back to Japan?"

"Well, no. Bubba was killed by a Japanese whaling fleet. I snuck on board."

"Oh, no! Poor Bubba the Friendly Whale! How awful!"

"He lived a full life," Nancy shrugged. "Swimming around, blowing water through the top of his head, terrorizing insane sea captains…"

"Wow, Nancy. That's some story," Yomiko said a little helplessly. "Although, I'd be more interested if someone wrote it down. They could call it Bubba the Friendly Whale! Although, I think I've heard a story like it before. But the whale had a different name. Moby-something, I think."

"Uh, sure. Anyway, let's just say that if I wake up in the middle of the night, screaming, you'll know what it's about."

"I'm really sorry you had to go through that," Yomiko said, eyes growing slightly wobbly with tears.

"Well, it was my own fault for phasing through the planet," Nancy said with a shrug. "I'm fine now, so don't worry about it. I just don't particularly like being asked repeatedly, 'what's it like, riding inside a whale?'"

"I guess I wouldn't, either," Yomiko admitted. "It kind of seems like asking about that would cheapen the _real_ worst part of what happened to you."

"But, hey, I got out alive, right?"

"I'm glad," Yomiko said, eyes growing wide and shiny.

Nancy had just enough time to smile and chuckle softly before being engulfed in a fierce hug.

* * *

"Hey, check it out!" Joe #6 whispered excitedly to Joe #13, peering in through the window at the two young women with their arms about one another. "It's them!"

"Are there clothes flying?" Joe #13 asked suspiciously.

"No, I don't think so," Joe #6 replied, peering more closely through the gap in the curtains. "Although, the girl with glasses has her tie a bit askew."

"No flying clothes, though?"

"Nope. Just hugging."

"Then I don't care," Joe #13 said airily, turning and walking away.

This turned out to be exceedingly ill planning on his part, as the two Joes were currently perched precariously on a ledge just outside the hotel room's window, eight storeys up.

"Joe!" Joe#6 cried, horrified, as he watched a mirror image of himself plummet toward the ground.

"I'm okay," a weak warble drifted up towards him several breathless seconds later. "The ground broke my fall."

With a sigh, Joe #6 whipped out a communication device, vaguely resembling a coffee cup.

"Joe here."

He paused.

"Whaddaya mean, which one?! We are all distinctive and vital individuals!"

Another pause.

"Joe #6. Yeah. #6. I think #13 is out of commission for a while."

Another pause.

"We're outside Agent Paper and Nancy Makuhari's hotel room. Should I attack?"

Another pause.

"Because #13 is on the ground, twitching a little."

Another pause, this time decidedly nervous.

"Uh…it wasn't? Geez…'cause #13 said these were your orders: to find and kill Agent Paper and Nancy Makuhari."

Several seconds later…

"Oh. We were supposed to get Joe _away from_ Agent Paper and Nancy Makuhari, and then kill _him_! I get it now!"

This time, a pause just on the right side of panicked.

"Uh…you want me to come back to headquarters right now and see your weapons collection, sir?"

* * *

The sun was shining brightly. The birds were chirping in the trees. All in all, Joker reflected contentedly, it was shaping up to be quite a lovely day.

Something was wrong, though; he couldn't quite put his finger on it, as it were, but he had the feeling that something was going to happen any second – something excruciatingly annoying that would quite ruin the peacefulness of the day.

"Hey…Mr. Joker?"

Joker looked up with an irritated sigh at this interruption, noting that, really, he was quite a prophet.

"What is it, Joe?"

"I get the feeling that you don't like me much."

"You're surprisingly perceptive, Joe," the blond man said with a smile that would have been a smirk if it had been on anyone else.

"And I don't understand it!" Joe hurried on. "We were getting along great before! Just earlier today! I'd make coffee, you'd drink it, you'd drink some more, you'd drink some more, and then you'd run away frantically, muttering about finding a little boys' room quickly? Those were great times, weren't they?"

Joe sighed, wistful and shiny-eyed. Joker nearly-smirked again.

"Wonderful."

"What went wrong? I mean, what _happened_ to us?"

Joker shot Joe a glare that was exceedingly vicious – for him; it was a mere narrowing of eyes.

"Don't pretend friendship, you bastard. I've had enough of your manipulation by coffee."

"Speaking of coffee," Joe began hopefully, "I think I'll have a cup. If I make a pot, will you have some too?"

"Grrgh," Joker said pleasantly.

"Er, what was that, Joker?" Wendy asked, stopping short in the act of entering his office.

"Grrgh," he repeated.

"Oh, right, I've got it now," she said.

"Glad to help."

"Hey, you want a cup of coffee, babe?" Joe asked from the coffee maker that he had set up on a table on the wall adjacent to the desk.

"Don't _call_ me that! And no thank-you," she finished resentfully.

Joe looked horrified.

"Oh, no! I forgot; you only drink tea, right? Oh, Joe, you moron!"

"Agreed," Joker muttered under his breath.

"Look, don't get mad, snugglebunny. Just wait there, I'll go get some tea," Joe continued before bolting from the room.

"No, wait, Joe, that's okay! I don't…need any," Wendy finished with a sigh as the door slammed shut amid the ring of the telephone. "Oh, well. At least it's really _good_ tea." Then, as something occurred to her, she blinked several times. "Snugglebunny?!"

"Hello?" Joker said into the receiver a second later. "Oh, hello, Miss Deep."

Silence.

"Ah. I see. A Joe peeking in your window. Number Six, is he? Kept him tied up all last night? In the bathtub? Poor fellow. Well, then, bring him along by. Perhaps he can tell us something."

Silence.

"Oh, you already are bringing him by. Just entering the building. I see."

Another moment of silence, as Joker's expression shifted to one of disgust.

"No, don't bother going back; leave the splattered remains of Number Thirteen where you found them. Thank-you. We'll see you two – you three – soon, then."

He set the telephone back onto its stand, and looked up, rather pained.

"Wendy, go warn Joe that one of his clones that are currently out for his blood is on his way here with Agent Paper and Miss Deep right now."

"What?!"

"I know," Joker sighed, rubbing his forehead wearily. "It's a terrible turn of events, isn't it?"

"No, that's not what I meant," Wendy huffed. "You actually want me to go _talk_ to Joe?!"

"We all have our crosses to bear, Wendy," Joker said dryly.

As she left, grumbling all the way in a manner that would have made Drake's eyes glisten with sentimental pride at having acquired another convert, she narrowly avoided colliding with Nancy, Yomiko, and Joe #6 on the threshold.

"Oh, hello, Miss Makuhari! Hello, Yomiko!" she greeted brightly before hastily leaving.

"Wow; she's cute," Joe #6 noted thoughtfully.

Nancy sighed in despair, wondering how much worse things could get, as the three made their way into Joker's office.

"Ah! Hello, Miss Deep, Agent Paper, Joe."

"What should we do with him?" Nancy asked briskly and coolly, gripping Joe #6 tightly by the back of the shirt.

"He looks a little puny," Drake commented from the door as he strode into the office in a show of utterly uncanny timing. "Better throw him back."

Joker made an impatient noise.

"Drake, do you honestly want to send an I-Jin assassin back to the I-jin?"

"Better than listening to him," Drake shrugged.

Joe #6's expression grew horrified.

"No! You can't send me back to them! Ikkyu's going to kill me!"

"Why?" Joker asked, honestly astonished.

"For being stupid!" Joe #6 wailed.

"For being stupid!" Wendy, who had just slipped in quietly to inform Joker that their Joe was currently under the table in the coffee room and curled into a whimpering ball, echoed. "Goodness! If we killed _our _Joe every time he was stupid, we would have done so several times by now!"

"Now, that sounds like time well-spent," Drake muttered, eyes shining wistfully at the thought. "What do you say, Joker? It's never too late to start, right?"

Meanwhile, Joe #6 had whirled about to see who this new arrival was. His face shifted from terror to a sly grin as his eyes lit on the ever-unfortunate blonde.

"Hey, baby, how you doin'?"

"Have I mentioned that I hate everyone and everything?" Wendy asked pleasantly. "Hold on a second; did that count as Joe saying something stupid? You know, Mr. Joker, you never answered Drake's question..."

"You really have to slow the process of turning evil, Wendy," Joker chided gently as she smiled a smile evil enough to cause Joe to inch away, whimpering, which became much less impressive when one considered that most things were sufficient to accomplish this. "If you do too much now, you'll have no room left for development. And remember, most of the fun of being evil is the process of getting there."

Drake leaned over to Yomiko.

"Are you beginning to wonder what the hell he's talking about there?"

"Not really," Yomiko confessed, looking up from her book briefly.

"Have _I_ mentioned that _I_ hate everyone and everything?" Drake asked, much less pleasantly.

"Yes, Drake, you have mentioned that several times," Joker said tiredly.

"So, what's on the agenda for today? Are we going to go out and _do _anything, or are we going to sit here drinking coffee again?" Drake demanded.

"Well, the first order of business for today is to decide what we'll do with our new friend, Joe over here," Joker replied.

"Find out what he knows," Nancy suggested.

"Yeah; and what'll we do with the other twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes, and thirty seconds of the day?" Drake snorted.

"That's mean!" Joe #6 protested.

"Sure is," Drake agreed. "But it's true."

"They're like a group of children," Joker muttered to himself as Joe stuck his tongue out petulantly at Drake. "Perhaps teaching preschool was the way to go, after all…"

-----------------------------------------------------

End Notes: Waay! We've – tentatively – got back to the point of the story: Yomiko and Nancy! Oh, and the plot, sort of. Well, that should improve next time…although, this isn't the first time I've promised that… :o)


End file.
